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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

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TORONIO 



THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

A Study of the Great War as an 

Incident in the Evolution 

of Society 



BY 

ALBERT G. KELLER 

PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY 

IN YALE UNIVERSITY 

AUTHOR OF "SOCIETAL EVOLUTION" 



Revised Edition 



il3eto gorfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1921 

All rights reserved 



:P 






Copyright, 1918 and 1921, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Printed from type. Published March, 1918. 

Revised Edition 
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1931. 



MAR 23 1921 
g)C!.A611380 



PREFACE 

(to the second edition) 

The main purpose of this little book, as 
originally written, is stated in the Introduc- 
tion. It was a war-book and would not have 
appeared but for the war. It attempts, how- 
ever, to view that tremendous event in its evolu- 
tionary setting; and I have known a number of 
beginners in the study of societal evolution who 
have got their bearings in that subject more 
readily through this book as an approach. Most 
young men are familiar with the outstanding 
facts concerning the late conflict, and pass with 
less difficulty from the specific case to the general. 
I wish to use this book, and am therefore unwill- 
ing to have it drop out of print. 

The original occasion for writing has passed, 
and the occasional character of this essay should 
be removed, if it is to be used in classes for some 
years to come. That could be most thoroughly 
done, no doubt, by re-writing, in the past tense 
and in the mood of the historian. But I am un- 
willing to sacrifice whatever vividness the treat- 
ment may have, by reason of having been struck 



vi PREFACE 

off hastily and with intensity of feeling, during 
very dark days. I have therefore contented my- 
self with removing errors, simplifying certain 
passages, cutting out others which were well 
enough when hostility ran higher, and inter- 
polating one chapter at the beginning. 

We have come through war and victory to 
peace. The peace is defective enough as yet; 
but there can be no great storm without pro- 
tracted agitation of the upheaved waters. One 
who surveys these national and international 
matters from the point of view for which this 
book contends, looks for eventual and better ad- 
justments as confidently as, in the darker days, 
he expected the eventual vindication of civiliza- 
tion. 

A. G. K. 

New Haven. 
January 6, 1921. 



INTRODUCTION 

There is a growing sentiment in this country 
that what Germany has come to stand for is 
utterly irreconcilable with all those acquisitions 
of human society — freedom, democracy, hu- 
manity, Christianity — which we most prize; 
that it represents a grave menace to them all. 
This sentiment, with its attendant foreboding, I 
believe to be substantially correct, so that it 
will bear examination in the light of reason and 
science. I think it can be shown that the Ger- 
man code of international behavior constitutes a 
direct and grave challenge to the essentials of 
civilization; that it is a reversion toward an 
earlier and cruder phase of societal development; 
and that it must be extirpated if civilization is 
to go forward on its course. 

If reason is to be found back of this popular 
presentiment, that fact will confer a certain solid- 
ity and surety upon what we might otherwise, in 
the face of specious argument or unpleasant 
consequences, cleave to less tenaciously. It will 
lead to the strengthening of hearts. But strong 
hearts are what we require in these times; for 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

the world is tiring under the burden of its loss 
and misery, and even the sturdiest has need of 
holding his convictions fast. There is also an 
indeterminate number who are less firm in the 
faith, and who are likely to falter unless they are 
fortified by an abiding belief that this challenge 
to civilization must and can be met and repelled, 
if we faint not. They need to be shown that re- 
lentlessness in the exaction of " restitution, repa- 
ration, and guarantees '' is not an expression of 
rage and revengefuluess, but rather of the high- 
est form of humanity — of interest in the wel- 
fare of all men, to be secured, in this case, by 
relieving the race of the German peril. It is 
" Through War to Peace," and not otherwise. 
A faith has never been weakened by the demon- 
stration that it had reason behind it. 

Some of us are further convinced that this 
peril is certain to be eliminated, now or later, by 
the operation of the elemental forces which have 
made civilization what it is. Here is a cause 
that cannot fail. But we want it to triumph now 
rather than later. For it is at the cost of much 
human agony that the operation of these ele- 
mental forces is hindered and retarded, through 
a failure to understand and work with them; 
and their action may be hastened, with the result 



INTRODUCTION ix 

of sparing human suffering, if we seek to under- 
stand and fall in with their massive stress and 
do not, for the sate of petty sentiment, throw 
ourselves, as chosen victims, across their path. 
This issue is going to be settled aright despite 
human foolishness — despite even an easy-going 
and irrelevant " magnanimity " ; and if we can 
see that now, and not try to stop the process short 
of a definitive decision, we shall save ourselves 
and those that come after us an infinity of suffer- 
ing. 

A rational justification for such convictions 
appears, I think, in the following pages. Events 
even so startling as those of the present fall into 
line as episodes of society's development, if the 
course of that development is seen in perspective 
— in the light, that is, of a general survey of 
societal evolution, made with no special reference 
to any one of its episodes as compared with the 
rest. But it is impossible to present this war 
in such a perspective without devoting some 
pages to an indication of the line of approach 
here adopted, and without using a minimum of 
terminology. This clearing of the ground will 
doubtless slow up the pace of presentation ap- 
preciably, but it has to be done if the conclusions 
in the last few chapters — to which the reader 



X INTRODUCTION 

who is impatient of the approach may refer — 
are to carry more weight than they would as 
mere expressions of personal opinion. 

Whatever enlightenment this essay has to offer 
is due to the fact that societies are here viewed as 
wholes and not in terms of their ultimate compo- 
nents, namely, individuals. Much is said of the 
dominance in societal evolution of the automatic, 
spontaneous, and impersonal, as against the 
individual and purposeful. It is in part for the 
sake of emphasising this point of approach that 
I use the adjective " societal," meaning " of 
society," instead of " social," which has no pre- 
cise meaning. It is my belief that the great mass 
of individuals pursue their petty interests as they 
see them, close at hand, in virtual unconscious- 
ness of the wide interests of the society, while 
the society moves ponderously on, under laws of 
its own, through a succession of phases which 
the individual has to accept, much as he accepts 
climate or rainfall, as conditions of life. The 
occasional endowed individual identifies the im- 
personal forces in the field and seems to control 
them, much as does the engineer, by moving 
things into or out of their way ; but the vast bulk 
of mankind live on unconscious of their very 
existence, or vaguely sensing it. 



INTRODUCTION xi 

There is a confused view of society that is the 
outcome of preoccupation with the individual, 
his psychology and his " choices ■ ' ; then there is 
another, which seems to some of us to offer 
superior clarity, that takes account of the indi- 
vidual as the ultimate component of society and 
then sets him aside. The latter view is the one 
taken here. It is not so obvious as the other 
and demands emphasis; but any one who has 
caught it once will not be much disturbed by the 
absence of fine balancings and whittlings in the 
pages that are to follow. 

Rightly or wrongly, I find myself in no great 
doubt or anxiety as to the ultimate outcome of 
this international conflict. My conclusions, as 
worked out for my own satisfaction, are some- 
thing of a comfort to me; and I hope they may 
be of use to others, in particular to those who, 
just because they are enviably able to lend the 
strength of their arms to the cause of civilization 
and human freedom, have the less leisure to re- 
flect over the wider aspects of the conflict. 

A. G. K. 

New Haven, December 27, 1917. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER »A0« 

Preface (to the Second Edition) .... v 

Introduction vii 

I. After the Crisis 1 

II. The Impersonal Character of the 

Issue 13 

III. Unforeseen Consequences to Society 19 

IV. Automatic Adjustments 27 

V. A People's War 39 

VI. Folkways and Societal Codes of Con- 
duct 47 

VII. Conflict an Essential to Selection; 

Peaceful Competition 58 

VIII. Public Opinion and the National Code 70 

IX. The International Peace-Group . . 86 

X. The International Code .... 96 

XI. The German Code 112 

XII. The Challenge to the International 

Code 122 

xiii 



xiv CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XIII. The Formation of a World-Opinion . 131 

XIV. Selection by War 142 

XV. German Fetish- Worship 153 

XVI. The One Way to Upset the Fetish . 163 

XVII. On Faltering at the Finish . . . 175 

XVIII. On Intelligent Adjustment to the In- 
evitable 188 



THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

I. AFTER THE CRISIS 

The original chapters of this little book — 
which follow, in practically unaltered form, the 
present chapter — were printed in the spring of 
1918. Their argument calls for the attainment 
of that military victory which sometimes seemed 
in those days nearly as remote as it was indis- 
pensable, but which has now slipped two years 
back into history. We are now on the farther 
side of the supreme crisis. 

If we have thus pressed on through war to 
peace, we should be glad that we have so credit- 
ably covered that much of the crisis-period, and 
should not be too much depressed because the 
peace we have, though in some of its aspects it 
" passeth understanding," is not yet the perfect 
one. If foresight were ever the equal of after- 
thought, we might have waged a flawless war and 
might now be basking in an immaculate serenity. 
But, as is indicated here and there in what fol- 
lows, this is not the way things human go. As 



2 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

they go, we are getting on normally enough, but 
with plenty of chance yet of falling into trouble if 
we relax our vigilance. So far, so good; but 
simply by winning the war, though that exploit 
was the indispensable next step in rendering the 
world a decent place to live in, we have not 
pushed all the way through to blessedness. The 
world's fever may be broken, but the patient is 
as yet no more than convalescent. 

These facts lead to the reflection that the crisis 
is not yet over. Tlie truth is that a crisis in the 
evolution of civilization can never be located at 
a point of time or identified with any single event. 
It is too big for that. It covers a period, rather, 
and the chain of events that runs through a 
period. A crisis is like a hill; we are in it, or 
on it, from the time we begin to mount until we 
are again upon the level. It is plain that we 
have passed the pinnacle of the crisis-hill up 
which we have been struggling; but it is naive 
to expect things to get back yet awhile to what 
we are wont to call the normal. Every barom- 
eter that we have registers us as still far from 
the level from which, years ago, we started. 

In short, the crisis-period is still on. Early 
in 1918 there was not much temptation to look 
beyond the supreme necessity of victory ; and the 



AFTER THE CRISIS S 

following chapters may seem, for that reason, 
to be out of date. Nothing is out of date which 
records a phase of the evolution of society and 
of civilization ; for the episodes of that evolution 
repeat themselves in their essentials, and it is 
well, both in theory and in practice, to be 
acquainted wdth their characteristics. We shall 
assume, in this chapter, that the supreme crisis 
is past, and shall devote brief attention to some 
of the major sequels of the war, which form the^ 
part of the crisis still to be traversed. 

One of the outstanding facts that confront us 
is that the world is much poorer than it was. 
Many products of human toil — the metals men 
have dug out of the earth, the chemical prepara- 
tions — have been scattered in useless fragments 
over large areas of Europe, dissipated by explo- 
sion into the air, or sunk in the sea. Wealth has 
been destroyed in destroying wealth, with the con- 
sequence of a doubled and re-doubled loss. In 
some districts the very soil has been annihilated. 
Suppose the world had now not only the wealth 
destroyed by war, but also the wealth that 
was used up in doing that destroying; would it 
not be an incomparably richer world? Suppose 
the energy diverted into the preparation of war- 
materials had been put into the production of 



4 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

the necessities of life ; would living not be easier? 
The high cost of living is due, doubtless, to many 
contributing factors, but the wholesale destruc- 
tion of wealth is certainly one of the most sig- 
nificant of them. 

And consider the loss undergone by the world 
in superior human material. Final official sta- 
tistics of the French Ministry fix the total num- 
ber of P^rench soldiers killed during the Great 
War at considerably over a million and a third. 
If these soldiers, and the other millions belong- 
ing to other nationalities, had been mere riff-raff, 
the race might have profited by their loss; but, 
as every one knows, they were not. Consider, in 
addition, the numbers that have perished other- 
wise than by being slain in war. Mere numbers 
are nothing; but these losses have involved qual- 
ity as well as quantity. The world is poorer 
in superior human beings, not only by reason of 
the dead individuals, but also because of the stop- 
page of many a superior strain of heredity. In 
the countries which have suffered, good men as 
well as good goods are hard to get. 

To regain the lost wealth there is need of labor 
and services of high quality. But production is 
not so readily to be reestablished. It is plain 
that not enough work is being done. This is due 



AFTER THE CRISIS 5 

partially to a reaction from the mood of self- 
sacrifice in the interests of the whole which was 
one of the brightest phenomena of the war-period. 
Labor has changed its point of view somewhat. 
During the war the laborers were told that all 
depended upon them; they were flattered and 
cajoled, and wages rose to an incredible figure. 
They gained a conception of their importance in 
the world, and wish now to be handled in a man- 
ner corresponding. They became conscious of 
their power, and propose to use it. No one can 
blame them if they do so with some exhilaration, 
or even overdo the matter in the swelling con- 
sciousness of power. Capital certainly did the 
same when it came to realize its strength. These 
oscillations always have to be endured or con- 
trolled, as may be, until they settle toward 
equilibrium. 

A consequence of the war that is more dis- 
quieting is the extravagance that has accom- 
panied the increase of labors winnings. The 
standard of living has risen immensely for many 
classes of laborers, and as usual when it has been 
enabled to rise swiftly and unexpectedly, there 
has been a lack of balance and sense in its mani- 
festations. If, now, conditions change so as to 
deprive the extravagant of the means of con- 



6 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

tinuing their extravagancies, it will be an excep- 
tion to all precedents if they acquiesce without 
resistance in returning toward the former stand- 
ard of living. Such a change of conditions will 
stimulate, rather, a discontent likely to find its 
expression in the support of some program for 
modifying tlie social order in the direction of 
socialism or worse. 

A further change of ideas, which amounts to 
another alteration in the standard of living, is 
the unwillingness of the ex-soldier to return to 
the farm. He was content there when he knew 
practically that life alone; but now there is a 
repellent flatness and dullness about it, and he 
stops in the city. Thus is production further 
handicapped ; thus is the disproportion further 
increased between moutlis and food. And the 
less successful the ex-soldier is in locating him- 
self again in the industrial organization, the 
surer he is to call for money-rewards for services 
rendered originally under liigher motive. 

When waters are troubled there always 
promptly appears a representation of those un- 
savory characters who sense the special opportu- 
nities for fishing. And no government, however 
strong and honest, has ever succeeded in holding 
the enemy off with one hand so as to have the 



AFTER THE CRISIS 7 

other free for the throttling of treachery within 
the country. Profiteering is sure to occur in 
war-times, and to last over into the unsettled 
periods that follow. Powers have been shifted 
and concentrated for the attainment of victory, 
and it is not so simple a matter to distribute 
them again to the stations where they belong in 
times of peace. Confusion is inevitable, no mat- 
ter how highminded the intentions of those who 
govern. And the period of confusion is the op- 
portunity of the thief of all descriptions, from 
the pickpocket to the heavy villain whose takings 
are at the expense of all of us. 

Here is a series of maladjustments consequent 
largely upon the War. But even if all the se- 
quels of the conflict were similarly uncomfort- 
able and expensive, the main decision would yet 
have been worth the cost. These matters will 
settle themselves at length and i)robably peace- 
ably — if not peaceabh^, then they would have 
had to be settled by war in any case, and the de- 
struction of Prussianism remains no less a gain 
for the world. But not all of the aspects of the 
continuing crisis-period are discouraging. We 
have not only escaped a great peril, a fact which 
we should never allow ourselves to forget, but 
we stand to win much that we are now in a posi- 



8 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

tion, never before occupied by the world, to reach 
out for. 

I do not need to catalogue the contributions 
of this war to the arts of peace. Under the tre- 
mendous stress of the conflict inventions and dis- 
coveries have been forced into being long before 
they would have emerged under ordinary condi- 
tions. Consider, as one outstanding example, 
the progress of aviation. Necessity raised to a 
high power has been fecund in otispiiug. 

Again, it seems unquestionable that, despite 
certain irritating results, the participants in the 
conflict, in this country, at least — and that does 
not mean the front-line fighters alone — have 
gained much from their experience and devotion. 
Physical drill and the identification and treat- 
ment of physical defects have done much for 
many. Enforced attention to hygiene in its vari- 
ous forms has left a product of wholesome habi- 
tudes; not all have relapsed when the coercion 
has been removed. Thrift has been learned even 
by those who have temporarily forgotten the les- 
son; and the reports of savings-institutions dis- 
close a condition that offsets somewhat the men- 
ace of extravagance. The present is not much 
to judge by, for it is, clearly enough, a period of 
dislocation and readjustment — of " reconstruc- 



AFTER THE CRISIS 9 

tion " as the eupliemist asserts and as the discreet 
hope. Those who come after, and are not dis- 
traught by the confusion, the heat and dust, 
of this period, will judge as to this. 

No one is very well satisfied at a time like this, 
and opinions may differ widely as to the promise 
of weal or the prospect of woe in such matters 
as have been set down above. There is no point 
in prolonging illustration. But there is yet to 
be noted the central, most outstanding, and most 
significant product of the crisis-period. This is 
the League or Society of Nations. A League to 
Enforce Peace had been suggested when the fol- 
lowing chai)ters were written; and since that 
time ideas of such an adjustment have taken more 
and more definite form, and have arrived, at 
length, at the stage of formulation, discussion, 
general acceptance, and incipient application. 

The argument of this book indicates some such 
adjustment to the altered conditions of the life of 
human society, as a necessity for the present 
and future well-being of the race. And there is 
as little doubt that the international peace-group 
will attain to the formulation of its constitution 
and to its regulative organization as there was 
that the international code would receive vindica- 
tion as against the challenge of the German code. 



10 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

This is not because certain individuals have been 
" idealistic," or have produced a perfect or faulty 
set of specifications, or, whatever their motives, 
have sought to withstand the first attempts to 
formulate and organize. Society must, as a con- 
dition of its very self-preservation, advance to a 
more comprehensive organization; and that 
necessity is unconsciously or consciously sensed 
by the masses of mankind. They feel that some- 
thing such is imperative to the realization of the 
interests that press upon them. They are un- 
willing not to tiy to make an adjustment in the 
indicated direction. No covenant and league de- 
signed to avoid future war and to promote peace 
and amity can be, at this time, a mere paper 
constitution, corresponding to nothing actual; 
for the current of public opinion has set in to- 
ward these desirables, and they must needs ap- 
pear and be tested out. 

That any pioneer variation in this direction 
must be found faulty and need correction is to be 
expected; and no sensible man has ever thought 
otherwise. The Constitution of the United 
States was considerably amended, even in the 
early days. The only candid objection to any or 
all variations lies in hopeless conservatism or in 
timorousness before an issue — qualities which 



AFTER THE CRISIS 11 

have always opposed, but never permanently 
thwarted, new and more expedient adjustments. 
Even a hermit nation is eventually, and despite 
itself, drawn from its isolation into a fuller life. 
With the several types of uneandid opposition, 
either to the new in general, or to the Society of 
Nations in particular, I need not concern myself ; 
and I am glad to escape the need of rehearsing 
the sorry tale. 

The erection of an international organization 
is indicated as clearly as was once the organiza- 
tion, on the smaller scale, of the nation, or of any 
federation of states such as the British Empire 
or the United States. It is not a question of 
stopping the current, or of seriously diverting it ; 
it is one, rather, of forecasting its course and 
adjusting to it. With most of the provisions for 
a League, as struck off by representatives of the 
Allies, there is no serious quarrel on the part of 
any intelligent and candid man ; they are quite as 
good, to start with, as have ])een the provisions 
of many an historic Charta to whose formulators 
we now assign, not by reason of their infallibility 
as regards detail, but because of their grasp of 
broad essentials, a mythical preternatural sagac- 
ity. It is only because our thinking is preoccu- 
pied with visions of revealed perfection, or tradi- 



12 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

tions of such, that we fail to realize the obvious 
fact that nothing that has life in it can remain 
unchanged in a changing world. And to refuse, 
because of personal or partisan aversions, to con- 
sider movements of such moment on their merits 
is like declining to get out of the way of an 
avalanche because one has been warned by an un- 
loved voice. 

Although the rest of this book contemplates the 
crisis-period only up to the defeat of Germany, 
yet such sequels to the war as I have presented, 
by the selection of a few out of many, likewise 
belong to that period, and must be reckoned in as 
members of the evolutionaiy series. And it is 
to be noted, by way of linking this chapter to 
the following ones, that all these matters belong 
to the category of unforeseen consequences of the 
gathering and breaking conflict. All are normal 
and could have been predicted if we had known 
enough. We cannot aspire to offhand omnisci- 
ence, but there is notliing to prevent us from 
learning what we can from past stretches of 
evolution and forecasting as best we may what 
to expect in the future. 



II. THE IMPERSONAL CHARACTER OF 
THE ISSUE 

To all of us most of the time, and to most of 
us all of the time, the course of this war has been 
a succession of particular events and of the do- 
ings of particular persons. The head-lines are 
scanned to see whether the battle-lines have 
changed, whether this or that wavering neutral 
has thrown its lot into the struggle, whether the 
prospects of the Loan have improved, and so on. 
Even more typical of our attitude is the interest 
in persons. What has been said overnight by the 
President, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, the Ger- 
man Chancellor, Trotzty, Colonel Roosevelt? 
Has Edison discovered anything? Has Hoover 
any new project? Are there any more revela- 
tions from the Department of State concerning 
German " diplomacy "? Or — a matter of still 
more intimate personal interest — is the 
acquaintance, friend, brother, or sou, about to be 
called? Is the reader of the day's news himself 
to be drafted? 

We cannot help being interested in these im- 

13 



14 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

mediate things. That in the way we live — 
amidst the definite and immediate; and then, too, 
we think with less strain if we think in terms of 
persons. In fact, the race has always personal- 
ized the less tangible and more abstract things, 
for by such means it has been possible to tie up 
floating and evasive conceptions so that they can 
be found again and dealt with. The vast im- 
personalities that control our destiny — Nature, 
Chance, God — are rendered into terms that men 
are more used to handle. It is as if one should 
meet some difficult pi'()])()sition, full of subtleties 
of thought, in a ])artially known foreign lan- 
guage; he will feel more secure if he gets it over 
into the mother-tongue before he tries to do much 
with it. The de-personalization of what has been 
long personalized has demanded a tedious pro- 
cess of mental discijiline and development. " It 
is diflicult,'' writes Darwin, " to avoid personify- 
ing the word Nature " ; and he warns against the 
superficial interpretation that is commonly put 
upon the term by the reader — he himself is 
emj)loying it, for brevity's sake, to cover " the 
aggregate action and product of many natural 
laws." 

But absorption with the immediate and per- 
sonal, though natural enough, does not make for 



THE CHARACTER OF THE ISSUE 15 

comprehensiveness of view. It prevents us from 
seeing the woods for the trees. To see the woods, 
it is necessary to secure distance and detach- 
ment. Yet a view of the woods is sometimes 
highly desirable, especially if one is confused by 
the number and apparently unmeaning location 
of the trees. To see the forest it is necessary 
to get outside of it, whether that be done by some- 
how ascending above it, or by having recourse 
to the mind's eye and viewing the broad lay of 
the land from the mapped-out results of the 
experience of othei*s. 

I suppose that no one will quarrel very much 
over the aptness of this analogy to the present 
facts. In the matter of this war-situation we 
are wandering in the woods, and most of us are 
concerned as to where we are and how and at 
what place we are going to get out. But the 
analogy is employed merely by way of setting 
the situation before us; it is not conceived of as 
carrying any weight of argument. 

In viewing the course of the war, then, atten- 
tion has been much focussed upon persons — 
personages, perhaps, might be the better term. 
But this tendency goes farther. Human groups, 
such as the Bolsheviki, the War Council, the 
pacifists, and even larger groups or societies, 



16 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

as the Belgians, Jugo-Slavs, Entente Allies, or 
Neutrals, are seen as a combination of the in- 
dividuals that compose them rather than in their 
impersonal corporate form. In fact, we are 
prone to think of any human society, or of So- 
ciety in general, in terms of its components rather 
than as an entity in and of itself. We also tend 
to personify Society as we do Nature, and do not 
ordinarily think of it (to adapt Darwin's words) 
as the aggregate action and product of many 
societal laws. 

This conception of human society as a sort of 
composite of individuals, having no special being 
of its own, is an easy and obvious one; and it 
has been elaborated by theorists. These hold, 
briefly stated, that to understand society the 
object of interest and study is the individual; 
and that, since the mind of the latter is the part 
of him that attends to his social relations and 
interactions, the prime object in the study of 
society is to become clear on individual psy- 
chology. Study the human intellect and you are 
on the way to an understanding of the '' social 
mind," which directs society's destiny. Then 
presently you issue into " social psychology " or 
" psychological sociology," and the keys to the 
whole matter are delivered into your hands. 



THE CHARACTER OF THE ISSUE 17 

Social development, we are told, is the result of 
the reasoned and purposeful action of the in- 
dividual. An extreme of this view would, with 
Carljle, see the history of a nation in the biog- 
raphy of its heroic fig-ures. A social philosophy 
of this order is a popular one, for it lends learned 
support to that current i^rejudice toward interest 
in the personal and immediate (which we think 
we know without so much study, living in it as 
we do) to which allusion was made at the outset. 
It is the object of the present writing, however, 
to present that vast episode in societal evolution 
(meaning the evolution of human society) , which 
is working itself out before our eyes, from an 
altogether different point of view — one which 
recognizes the individual as a component part of 
society, and then ignores him, much as the phys- 
iologist recognizes the cell as the undoubted 
final component of this or that organ, or of the 
body, but then ignores it in favor of a study of 
the body as a whole. The body is an object of 
study by itself, and results are derived from 
physiology that could not be attained by restrict- 
ing attention to the cell. I do not intend, 
though, to enter into a technical controversy, but 
rather to cite, first, a series of societal changes 
belonging to the war-period, and for whose ap- 



18 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

pearance the reasoned purposefulness of the in- 
dividual has not been responsible; and then to 
present the advantages of what is to me a more 
commanding point of view for the observation 
and understanding of the societal formations 
and dissolutions that are taking place as the 
days go by. 



III. UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES TO 
SOCIETY 

Societal changes of great moment have taken 
place, not only in Europe, but in the rest of the 
world as well, since the war began. I do not 
refer so much to the almost complete national 
destruction of Belgium or Serbia, under the iron 
heel itself, as to the less direct consequences of 
the strife. I take examples almost at random, as 
they suggest themselves. In England there has 
come to pass a centralization of government, 
together with a decline of parliamentary control, 
that must startle the elderly Briton who contem- 
plates it. Again, the women are doing men's 
work, are beginning, in large numbers, to work 
for wages, and are not very far from getting 
the full franchise. The Irish question has taken 
on a new phase. There is a " back to the land " 
movement that represents a degree of reversal 
of the urban migration. People who used to be 
filled with pious horror at the thought of a man 
marrying his deceased wife's sister are reconsid- 
ering the status of illegitimacy — in view of the 

19 



20 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

presence of " war-babies '' — and there has even 
been reported some talk, on the part of perfectly 
reputable jieople, of examining into the merits of 
plural marriage. Here is a catalogue, by no 
means exhaustive, of societal right-abouts. 

The salient feat performed by the French has 
consisted in divesting tlieuiselves of what used 
to be regarded as their traditional race-character. 
It is now demonstrated that they are as steady 
and enduring as the best. They are as far as 
possible from being a nation of frivolous, excit- 
able, quickly-tiring i)loasuro-lovers. Tlie former 
accounts of them did them injustice, but there 
can be no doubt now that their national life runs 
more seriously and strongly within more secure 
channels than it has done before. And such a 
basic cliange draws a far-flung sequence of insti- 
tutional inodilications in its wake. Further, 
French life and societal structure are being much 
altered by the presence in France of representa- 
tives of almost all the nations of the earth, many 
of whom, we are told, mean to remain. Some 
fear that the very national identity of France 
lies in the balance. 

The name Russia summons up a scene of in- 
stitutional upheaval and transformation. The 
outstanding fact is the passing of the Little 



UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES 21 

Father and the emergence of a new set of na- 
tional figures, pnrsning new methods under novel 
and even weird compulsions. Mother Vodka is 
banished as Mother Breshkovskaya returns. 
The mujik has been torn out of his isolation, 
where the dunghill before the hut has been the 
most prominent feature on the horizon of a sordid 
life, and has been not only smartly uniformed 
and drilled to stand erect, but also transported 
to unknown countries and his eyes perforce 
opened to unfamiliar things. His head has been 
filled also with undigested economic and social 
theory, and has reacted upon this pabulum in 
fantastic and unedifjing ways. But it is clear 
that he will never again be what he was or settle 
down contentedly to the old life. Russia may 
be an incalculable variable for some time to come; 
but the limit it approaches can never be that 
status ante bellum. For the deeps have been 
stirred. 

If the French have divested themselves of their 
traditional race-character, the Germans have 
done no less. I do not need to go into the re- 
pulsive tale; it is enough to say that the mani- 
festations of German manners and morals were 
received by the world with utter incredulity until 
the evidence became irresistible. It is a question 



22 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

sometimes debated whether this barbarity was 
or was not in the national make-up; whether 
there was any real change here or merely a reve- 
lation. It looks as if Germany was so ready for 
predatoi-y war that not much adjustment to its 
conditions was necessary. It is all a question of 
whether the peoi>le have been with their rulers or 
not ; and the consideration of that question must 
be postponed for the moment. There have been 
recurrences of unrest in (Jermany, followed by 
ostensible yieldings and cajolery on the part of 
the government ; but opinion as to what is really 
occurring, or about to occur, must remain, in 
the absence of trustworthy evidence, largely in- 
ferential, or based upon general considerations. 
And we know as little about what is happen- 
ing in Germany's vassal states, except that, what- 
ever it is, it is directed or countenanced from 
Berlin. There are indications that sections of 
the Alliance are somewhat restless under an in- 
exorable control that holds them from making 
adjustments which they are not loath to contem- 
plate. Not Turkey — for she has no qualms in 
remaining what she is and has been — but the 
Dual Empire, and even Bulgaria, give signs of 
concern over the state in which they find them- 
selves; and neither the one nor the other seems 



UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES 23 

entirely willing to embrace all the methods of 
their unscrupulous pace-setter. Only Turkey 
finds herself in sympathetic harmony with her 
own type of theory and practice. 

Of all the societal changes consequent on the 
war none are more astonishing, though some are 
more dramatic, than those which have occurred 
in the United KStates. It is evident that our for- 
mer " beneficent isolation " belongs to history. 
It suffered inroads as a consequence of the Span- 
ish War and the brief imi)erialistic fever; and 
subsequent improvements in annihilation of dis- 
tance had left it but a shell. Industrialism 
under isolation has ceased, for us, to represent 
adjustment to our national life-conditions. This 
the war has revealed. And now we have swung 
far toward militancy, if not toward militarism.^ 
A few years ago a military and naval budget of 
a few hundred millions was considered scandal- 
ously high, and, indeed, inconsonant with the 
spirit of American institutions ; twenty, or even 
ten years ago, the man who proposed conscrip- 
tion might as well have suggested having a king. 
And now we approve almost unanimously a 
budget of billions and compulsory service — if 

1 For the distinction here made between the two terms, see 
p. 139. 



24 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

the votes of Congress, the sentiment of the press, 
the general acquiescence and even enthusiastic 
support of the people, and the spirit of the na- 
tional array may form a basis for judgment. 
There can be no question about our so-called 
industrialism having experienced a shrewd and 
rugged wrench in the direction of militancy. 
In the face of a menace and a need, our society 
has stirred uneasily, groped about after relief, 
pawed over the traditional expedients, and finally 
settled down upon the most drastic of them. 

Delegation of i)0wer to the executive has sur- 
passed anything the country has ever seen before ; 
and there has set in an era of control over indus- 
tries and of price-fixing that reminds one in tni ii 
of the Middle Ages and of socialistic Utopias. 
To a few men have been committed in(iuisitorial 
powers which would have been impossible of dele- 
gation a few years, or even months ago. And 
among the startling innovations comes the move- 
ment toward economy; Cassandras who have be- 
wailed our wastefulness now stand aghast and 
fall backward before the sudden realization of 
their wildest dreams. For there is a goodly 
nucleus of citizens who are making a business of 
saving and who are seizing the opportunity to 
edge the masses over in that direction. There is 



UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES 25 

also a large, though indeterminate body of us, 
male and female, who are doing something which 
bears at least an appearance of usefulness — 
knitting in the first row of the balcony, for ex- 
ample — instead of employing our time and 
strength in exclusively non-productive or waste- 
ful activities. We do not now hear so much of 
bridge and the fox-trot. 

Again, a revision of policy in regard to immi- 
gration, and in particular of the attitude toward 
the foreign-born, is indicated. Doubts as to the 
unlimited efficiency of the " melting-pot '' have 
been voiced ere now ; ])ut the revelation that some 
of our accessions to poi)ulation — and those not 
the most recent, either — still harbor a feeling 
toward tlie fatherland that is somewhat warmer 
and more })alpable and practical than sentimental 
reminiscence, has come as a great shock to every 
patriot. As a measure of common caution, a 
revision of easy-going and trustful methods and 
of careless optimism is demanded. Foreign lan- 
guages in schools, foreign news-sheets, and 
foreign associations designed to keep up home- 
ties, not to mention more sinister purposes, are 
now at a discount. The advocates of restriction 
of immigration have been given a considerable 
lift. 



26 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

Not to prolong this list, but one additional 
alteration of societal policy will be noted. It was 
a statesman's insight that saw in the Mexican 
difficulty a chance to strengthen our ties with 
South America; but the war has infused an ele- 
ment of fellowship that has not existed before. 
Common danger and common resentment have 
fostered sentiments that are replacing the former 
uninformed indifference or even impatient dis- 
esteem on our part, and the resentful mortifica- 
tion and suspicion on the other side, with a 
mutual toleration, understanding, and apprecia- 
tion that promise much to the interest of both 
parties. 

This catalogue of societal changes during the 
war-period is not complete — something un- 
foreseen is happening to organized forms of 
religion, for example — but it is probably not 
far from representative. With this type of 
event in mind, we now go on to inquire to what 
extent the reasoned pnrposefulness of the in- 
dividual has been responsible for its appearance. 



IV. AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 

Had the war not occurred, most of the societal 
changes just cited, and many another that the 
reader can call to mind, would not have taken 
place now, or perhaps at all. Very likely the 
Russian revolution was due in the near future; 
but the American swing toward militancy was 
not. In all cases the war-conditions were the 
precipitating agency. Much in the way of so- 
cietal structure has been awaiting selection, or 
has beeu involved in the process, that would not 
have attained to a si)eedy verdict but for the war, 
with its general dislocations, revelations, and 
readjustments. But it is evident that the war 
was not started for the realization of any such 
purposes. The Germans did not set out to get 
the vote for British women nor yet to enforce 
economy in this country ; not even the British or 
the Americans had either of these ends in view in 
entering the conflict. Germany, in fact, did not 
want either England or the United States to 
participate; she planned to have them both go 
their unsuspecting, careless, and decadent way 

27 



28 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

until she got ready for them. There was no pur- 
pose in the minds of any foreigners, for example, 
that we should adopt conscription. It is cer- 
tainly no vindication of reasoned purposefulness 
when the actual results come to the purposers as 
a surprise, involving disappointment and even 
consternation. 

The societal changes in the several countries 
developed automatically and impersonally in so 
far as the originators of the conflict were con- 
cerned. The state of war drew in its train a set 
of consequences; situations appeared, for the 
most part uni)lanned and unforeseen, to which 
the several societies secured adjustment by their 
respective alterations of policy. Let us look first 
into the process of adjustment to these situations 
consequent upon war, to see whether it should 
be called automatic or whether it should be re- 
ferred to the reason and purpose of the indi- 
vidual ; then we can go back and inquire whether 
the state of war itself was brought about by auto- 
matically acting, impersonal forces or by those 
same faculties of the individual. 

Broadly speaking, all adjustment of society to 
its life-conditions is enforced by the pain of mal- 
adjustment, or the prospect of such pain, as 
sensed by numbers of individuals; and it is 



AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 29 

secured when members have concurred in a course 
of action that brings relief. But it is inadmis- 
sible to credit that action to individual reason 
and purpose unless a great majority, at least, of 
the society members have really taken in the 
broad situation confronting the society and have 
deliberately chosen the expedient that was 
adopted. This very rarely occurs unless the situ- 
ation is exceptionally easy of visualization; and 
an international situation — generally foreseen 
by but few — is seldom, if ever, that. It is 
hardly fair to give credit to individual reason 
and purpose if only a few have really visualized 
the situation, and the rest have gone as the few 
wanted to go, under a variety of irrelevant mo- 
tives. But we hasten to concrete illustration. 

In England one of the aspects of the situation 
following on war was a growing disproportion 
between the sexes. In the face of the traditional 
division of labor by sex, into man's work and 
woman's work, this meant a depletion of the 
male labor-supply, and a depletion coincident 
with an increasing demand for labor. Adjust- 
ment was possible only by the elimination, or at 
least suspension, of the time-honored tradition. 
There was, however, no general comprehension of 
the scope of such a change ; there was action, first 



so THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

of all, on the part of the women. This action was 
unreflecting as respects the broad societal issue 
and was taken in response to a variety of stimuli, 
irrelevant to the broad situation. Numbers of 
women, in concerted response to the need and to 
the opening opportunity, entered to fill the par- 
tial vacuum, much as cooler air-currents " natur- 
ally " flow toward a cyclonic center. These 
women followed their interests as they felt them : 
economic necessity, impatience with idleness, the 
desire to do as others were doing, loneliness, 
lo^^alty, fear of the enemy — all tliese and doubt- 
less many another motive moved the individual. 
The situation facing the nation was visualized, 
doubtless, by a few; and many went in on the 
basis of general patriotism — of which, as a rea- 
soned motive, more later on. What is sometimes 
called the " elite " may have figured out the eon- 
sequences. Probably not more than one woman 
in a thousand entered an ammunition-plant or 
delivered mail in order to get the vote for women ; 
yet the furthering of the suffrage cause was one 
of the things that came of it. It was in good part 
the demonstration by women of their industrial 
efiflciency, as well as of their patriotism, that dis- 
posed the opposition to a change of heart. It had 
been the enforced idleness of hand and brain, as 



AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 31 

well as the emptiness of arms, that had goaded 
many women to an offensively restless activity; 
but now, in the face of the opening opportunities, 
even the militants, who had been pouring acid 
into mail-boxes and assaulting premiers, dropped 
their special purposes for the time and went to 
work — later to find their desires moving toward 
realization by way of a course of indirection fore- 
seen by few. The fact that married as well as 
single women are taking their places beside men 
as income-earners for life threatens even man's 
headship of the family, as well as his monopoly 
of the franchise. 

In cases like this (including those cited in the 
preceding chapter) there is a predominant ele- 
ment of unreasoned or even unwitting contribu- 
tion to the big result. People act on impulses of 
various description; upon sentiments that are 
diffuse, customary, or habitual rather than ra- 
tional and discriminating. It is usually the 
immediate personal interest only, and generally 
an economic one, that is pursued with a genuinely 
rational and purposeful motive. Loyalty and 
patriotism as motives, however creditable to the 
individual, as well as efficient and wholesome for 
the nation, are not usually rational. It is neces- 
sary to be very clear here on the distinction 



32 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

between that which we know to be the product of 
reason and that which looks, at first sight, as if 
it must have been. 

An expedient that " works " always impresses 
the partially informed as necessarily due to the 
planful action of some person : man or god. 
The camel's foot looks as if it had ])een skilfully 
planned for desert use ; the more exact our mathe- 
matics, says Maeterlinck in his " Life of the 
Bee," the nearer do we come to the formula of 
cell-construction practiced in the hive. But 
there is no question here of anything but the 
unplanned and automatic. When natural selec- 
tion is done, the product is always " rational " ; 
science has ever stumbled along after such 
facts. The nature-process issues in that which 
will stand to reason. But now the " social pro- 
cess " also can not but show the same sort of 
issue. The savages often practice what is in 
effect a quarantine on the house of death; they 
apply heat to a lame muscle to expel pain; they 
proscribe close in-marriage. But tliat any such 
regulations have adequate reasoning and purpose 
behind them few would be found to maintain. 
We cannot any longer accept the ghost-theory 
that fatliered them. Such action can be adjudged 
rational only if obseiTed in retrospect and in 



AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 33 

ignorance of its antecedents. So seen, there is a 
strong suggestion of reason; but the reason is 
after the act, and is put in by the more sophisti- 
cated observer. It is clear, then, that the cus- 
tomary or habitual may show the same sort of 
rationality as the " natural," and reveal results 
that reason would be proud to be credited with, 
and sometimes tries to appropriate. 

The occasion for drawing this distinction was 
the remark that loyalty and patriotism are not 
usually rational. They are matters of feeling 
and habit. They lie in custom. But the ex- 
pediency of many such social usages is so evi- 
dent, that is, they work so well, that they are 
credited to reason. In reality they have survived 
selection just as the nature-products have; only 
the selection is on the plane of societal, not or- 
ganic evolution. It could be shown that patriot- 
ism, and even jingoism, are sentiments that serve 
a society well, and have thus had a high survival- 
value in the course of its evolution. But it 
should now be clear that it will not do to consider 
an adjustment made by society to be the result of 
individual purposeful reasoning because of the 
patriotism behind it. If so, there is nothing to 
show that the condition created by the disi)ro- 
portion of the sexes in England, a consequence of 



84 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

the war, evoked, in the form of a far-reaching 
societal change, a reasoned and purposeful re- 
sponse on the part of individuals. 

It is difficult to descry much response of the 
rational order, or much even that might be mis- 
taken for such, in the Russian doings. The im- 
pression here is as of behemoth lurching uneasily 
about and making uncertain starts, now this way 
and now that, under the stress of undefined, ill- 
defined, and fleeting impulses — a vision of the 
crudely automatic. If adjustment comes about 
eventually, it will be through the lumbering and 
costly process of trial and failure, and that ir- 
respective of whether or not a glittering mahout 
rides on the monster's head as it finally plods 
into some course of adequate adjustment. All 
varieties of unreasoned and irrational cross- 
purpose are here having their day. 

In the United States a better informed people 
stands a more hopeful chance of thinking a new 
situation out and acting purposefully in the light 
of reflection. Take the movement looking to 
economy in living. Saving in the face of want is 
a pretty obvious expedient, and also it has to do 
with concrete and tangible things. It does not 
demand great intellectual tension; even the 



AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS S5 

savage does it. In this country, ease in the dis- 
semination of programs of saving, and of the 
simple considerations back of them, further aids 
the application of reason-directed purpose. It is 
apparently a hard case for alignment under the 
automatic category. It is not denied that the 
controllers of food, coal, and other indispensables 
will be able, by their propaganda, to enlist the 
rational support of millions. However, even 
here, the presence of the impersonal and auto- 
matic can be made out clearly enough. Many 
will save, not because they sense the peculiar 
reasons for so doing, but because they will auto- 
matically cease to consume the scarce and high- 
priced articles. And there are many who will 
never accept the reasonableness of economy-pro- 
grams, but, whatever they do — evade or obey — 
it will be done unintelligently. Reason will be 
enlisted by others, but only to support self-indul- 
gence and selfishness. Such unintelligent do- 
cility or unwilling acquiescence are far from 
being reasoned purposefulness in the face of a 
recognized societal issue. Even those individuals 
who economize " for the country,'' and do not 
go behind the phrase, afford no evidence for the 
theorist who insists that societal adjustment is 



86 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

by way of the intelligent, purposeful action of 
individuals in the face of visualized and under- 
stood conditions. 

The automatic element is more marked as the 
case is less concrete and immediate. There are 
many persons in this enliglitened land of op- 
portunity who have not the imagination to 
visualize anything but the most concrete and 
immediate. Their spheres of comprehension are 
narrowly circumscribed, and outside are merely 
ambiguous forms and fantastic hopes and fears. 
Often, however, they will take leading readily 
enough, especially if they are vaguely frightened, 
and if tlie leading does not impose too great a 
sacrifice of immediate interests. They are not 
moved by any theoretical or " academic " con- 
siderations and are not critical where their feel- 
ings are enlisted. What they need to move them 
is suggestion, applied and re-ap})lied. Here is 
the hope of the propagandist. 

" Too dark and pessimistic a picture," some one 
objects. Perhaps so ; but it must be realized that 
if the theory of reasoned, purposeful, individual 
action as the agency of society's adjustment is 
to be maintained, it must cover not only the 
" classes,'' but the " masses.'' The latter form 
the bulk of any society, and if it is to be moved, 



AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 37 

they must be moved. These are the people many 
of whom crave the yellow journal and are un- 
critical of its sensational appeal to the feelings 
and prejudices. Here are those who eannot be 
shown a fact so obvious as that the potato, how- 
ever scarce and costly, is not the sole food ai)pro- 
priate for a laborer. There are those among us 
who live in an adherence to tradition about as 
intelligent as that of any primitive tribe. There 
are as few of this class in this country as in any 
other, but they cannot fairly be ignored. They 
cannot be rightly included under a sweeping 
theory of societal adaptation as performed by the 
intelligent and purposeful response of individ- 
uals. 

Nor, on the other hand, should a theory of 
automatic adaptation be so sweeping as to take 
no account of the relatively few thinkers. I am 
interested here in exhibiting the presence of the 
ignored automatic element rather than in claim- 
ing everything for it. It is commonly lost to cal- 
culation, but it ought not to be, for it is the basic 
element. It dominates even when there are 
purposeful reasoners in seats of power, for the 
reasoners cannot go ahead without reference to 
public opinion. Facing a situation as we do, 
where economy is plainly called for, many 



38 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

respond intelligently and at once; it may even 
be that such persons can, in effect, respond 
vicariously for the rest. But if they do that, 
forcing or cajoling the rest into acting as the 
intelligent think best, then society's adjustment 
is not, in any reasonable interpretation of the 
case, one referable to the intellect and purpose 
of its constituent individuals. But, with this 
turn of the discussion toward the matter of 
leadership, we are drawn into considerations of a 
still more general order. 



V. A PEOPLE'S WAR 

There is, then, much reason to suppose that the 
several changes in societal arrangements and 
habitudes, effected in this and that society in 
adjustment to war-conditions, are typically auto- 
matic in their development. It is clear enough 
that most of these war-conditions, sex-dispropor- 
tion, for instance, were and are inevitable, repre- 
senting as they do a set of sequences set afloat 
automatically by the presence of war. It re- 
mains to inquire whether the war itself came 
about automatically or as the result of the rea- 
soned purpose of individuals. And it should be 
noted preliminarily that any war becomes 
straightway a " jieople's war '' if it becomes big 
enough and near enough to cause the people to 
believe, or to be persuaded, that the native land is 
threatened. Then they will rally to self-defense, 
inspired by feelings of patriotism, and can read- 
ily be shown, among other things, that a strong 
offensive is the best defense. 

This would seem to indicate that any group of 
men in power, or even any one man, can at any 

39 



40 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

time precipitate a war, aud a popular one, by 
stirring up a hornets' nest and then falling back 
upon the people. Doubtless this has been done; 
Bismarck was an adept at this sort of maneuver. 
But the question immediately rises as to why 
leaders of this ilk are in power, and why they 
are kept in power. Their type does, or does not, 
represent the national will. If it does — if Ger- 
mans are sure to be represented by this type of 
trouble-hunter — then the society must assume 
responsibility, the eminent indi\ddual dropping 
out except as an agent of the popular will. If it 
does not, then the inference is that this nation 
cannot or will not make its will felt as against 
Its rulers, either because it has no will or because 
extraordinary obstacles interpose to thwart ex- 
pression. The people are pathetically unin- 
formed, perhaps, or misinformed, or hopelessly 
prepossessed, or so docile and suggestible as to 
deserve the epithet " political imbecile." There 
is some evidence to support any one of these 
hypotheses ; a later chapter will be devoted to the 
special form of obsession to which the German 
people seem peculiarly susceptible. 

It is a matter of comparatively small con- 
sequence, seen in long perspective, that war 
eventuated in one year rather than another, or 



A PEOPLE'S WAR 41 

under one Emperor rather than another; the 
disharmony was sure to come to a head sooner or 
later, for it is a case of incompatibility between 
societal systems, each represented by the sort of 
spokesmen characteristic of it. The war came 
about as the result of the action of impersonal, 
automatically operative social forces on the order 
of the impersonal, automatically acting natural 
forces; the antics of a ruler giddy with self- 
importance could have been played only on a 
stage set for him. The sun was coming up any- 
how, whether Chanticleer crowed or not. 

Doubtless the despot of an unresisting, inartic- 
ulate sheep-people or Vichvolk could render a 
striking exhibition of purposeful action by the 
individual as the moving force in societal evolu- 
tion. But this is hardly the sort of evidence to 
thrill the soul of the theorist whose pet views 
it seems to support; it looks atavistic or deca- 
dent. No one could contemplate, with proprie- 
tary pride, as grist available for his theory-mill, 
the spectacle of millions being led about by the 
national nose, even when that organ is clutched 
between the knuckles of no less a personage than 
the high priest of Odinism. There have been too 
few cases of the sort in the present or the past to 
justify the conviction that such an one is normal, 



42 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

not pathological, if indeed it exists at all. And 
the German case is not yet closed; if there has 
been an incredible success in keeping a whole 
people uninformed, or misinformed, or under illu- 
sion, the misled may yet encounter a situation 
full of pain and disillusion that is calculated to 
spoil tlie completeness and perfection of the case 
for autocracy. The Kaiser may come to point 
the old Greek saying: Call no man hai)py till he 
is dead. It is a pretty far-gone imbecile that will 
not lash out if there is sufficient stimulus. 

As a matter of fact, the German people ac- 
quiesce in, where they do not heartily support, 
the programs of their rulers. If they did not, 
these programs could not be realized or even 
formulated. However the national sentiment is 
formed or guided, the lords of atfairs are power- 
less except as they are toleiated or supported by 
it. The purposeful action of the individual, 
how^ever exalted he may be, is no more than a 
variation on the theme set by the public opinion 
of the society. Even assuming that the Kaiser 
precipitated the present w^ar in order to harmo- 
nize elements with which he had been having dif- 
ficulty, and to justify the burdensome increase 
of armament, he could not have done this in an- 
other societ3^ If the Kaiser and his circle could. 



A PEOPLE'S WAR 43 

by some miracle, be transferred into the execu- 
tive offices at Washington, they would be power- 
less to make programs and create situations 
fraught with gratuitous menace to other peoples. 
And they would not hold office long. It is foolish 
to lay all this world-coil to individuals. To do 
so is to deal in mythology and adhere to magic. 
It is like believing that old women produce 
tempests by pulling off their stockings. 

For there has never been a despot so securely 
settled on the throne and surrounded by so power- 
ful an entourage, that he could not be shaken 
down by the popular will if he crossed it often 
or flagrantly enough. In the modern world most 
kings are mere figure-heads, and, like Edward 
VII, attain to personal influence and power only 
when they are popular. The old method of 
unseating the unpopular ruler, by revolution, 
is present even in our own day; but elections 
and other forms of " peaceful revolution " have 
also been devised to keep the real rulei's — 
prime ministers and presidents — under regular 
control by the popular will. The whole course 
of society's evolution has been marked by in- 
creasingly efficient adjustments permitting of the 
more unrestricted expression of that will. If the 
German people are in a position of impotence 



44* THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

in this matter, the case is an exception that must 
have some special and vagrant course of develop- 
ment behind it. It is in accord with what we 
know of the operation of societal evolution, 
throughout hunum history, to believe, in the 
absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, 
that Germany's rulers are expressing German 
public opinion, either present or recent, and 
that if they were not there to voice it, other 
channels of outlet would have been opened. 

I say that acquaintance with the operation 
of societal evolution leads to this conclusion. I 
might have said that plain common sense points 
to such a conviction. But there are many things 
that are said to " stand to reason '' which will 
not stand to scientific examination; in fact, the 
phrase " it stands to reason " is often employed 
as a sort of camoutlage to conceal some " intui- 
tion " or some belief that is harbored merely 
because we want to believe it. Here is a place 
for the application of " trained and organized 
common sense,'' which was Huxley's detinition 
of science. I shall now try to indicate the con- 
ception of societal evolution that goes with the 
belief in the predominance of the impersonal, 
spontaneous, and automatic in the life of society, 
and to " place " in this evolutionary process the 



i 



A PEOPLE'S WAR 45 

vast episode now being enacted with the whole 
world as a stage. 

From now on we shall confine attention, to the 
virtual disregard of the individual and his quali- 
ties and powers, upon societies. We have taken 
some little account of the trees, and now propose, 
without denying their indispensability as com- 
ponents, to view the woods. We shall deal in 
terms of a wider intention. For if, extending 
the perspective, we look over and beyond the 
individual, we see in this world-conflict the align- 
ment and confrontation of great societies — 
somewhat as Homer saw the vast forms of the 
higher powers seated unmoved above the fight- 
ing and dying mortals, or going al)out their pro- 
digious affairs, or engaging in immortal combat. 
The movements of these societies, so viewed, 
are impersonal and automatic after the manner 
of gravitation or osmosis, and the individual is 
lost to sight, or, rather, to identification, as he 
blends into the composite mass. It is from such 
a plane that we shall now view the conflict. 
Thus seen, it appears as a powerful selective 
factor in the evolution, not alone of the several 
nations, but of human society itself. Here is 
a vast laboratory of selection of the superorganic 
order — the greatest laboratory the social scien- 



46 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

tist has ever seen or heard of; for what is going 
on before his face is the most gigantic exhibition 
of that type of selection that the world has ever 
experienced. Now is his chance to get glimpses 
of the mass-motions that form the driving ener- 
gies of the tremendous process. 

A view of such matters in the large cannot be 
gained, however, without first giving some 
thought to tlie factors and processes of societal 
evolution in general. These should be capable, 
for the most part, of sinii)le and untechnical de- 
scription. In any ease the next item in my pro- 
gram is to attempt such an exposition.^ 

1 For a condensed statement of the author's views, of a 
more technical order and wider scope, see Keller, *' Societal 
Evolution." 



VI. FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 
OF CONDUCT 

The central figure in societal evolution is, as 
we shall view it, a human society. This is a 
group of human beings living in a cooperative 
effort to win subsistence and to perpetuate the 
species. Such a definition proposes for society 
the same functions that are familiar throughout 
the organic world: self -maintenance and self- 
perpetuation. The latter of these functions is 
a sort of extension, in time, of the former ; society, 
like an animal species, could exist awhile — for 
a generation — without it. But self-mainte- 
nance is fundamental and primordial ; it had to 
begin at once, and if there is going to be any 
species or society at all, it can never stop. In 
order not to complicate matters, let us fix atten- 
tion, at least for the moment, upon this basic 
matter of society's self-maintenance. 

Self-maintenance means primarily and uni- 
versally the food-quest; but it involves also, for 
most men, the provision for protection against 
the natural environment: clothing and other 

47 



48 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

shelter. This item of protection, when secured 
by industry, represents success, so far as it goes, 
in the struggle for existence. But there is an- 
other aspect of that struggle, when it is carried 
on against animate nature, namely, the competi- 
tion of life. This is a contest against plant, ani- 
mal, and fellow-man to attain or to retain that 
which makes existence possible, or to preserve 
life itself. Especially do men attempt to relieve 
other men of the products of the original indus- 
try, or wealth. Two main phases of the struggle 
thus reveal themselves, namely, industry and war 
for plunder. In the former the means of living 
are derived from the inanimate or animate en- 
vironment, by hunting and, later on, by herding 
and agriculture ; in the latter, by the appropria- 
tion of the product of the industry of others, or 
aggression. Always industry is the basic main- 
tenance activity. 

But the development of activities in self-main- 
tenance is not a haphazard, discontinuous pro- 
cess. When the first societies of which we know 
appear to view, they are already provided with 
a set of ways, or a traditional procedure, by which 
they carry on this activity, and every other of 
their activities as well. These ways represent a 
concurrence of group-members in the practice 



FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 49 

of expedients, economic, political, religious, or 
other, which have been proved to them, in the 
event, to be successful ones. These expedient 
ways have been called the folkways or mores. 
Language is one of the most typical of the mores ; 
division of labor is another. No one planned 
them, but they grew up and are practiced un- 
questioningly, unconsciously, and automatically. 
They correspond to habits in the individual. 
Taken all together, they constitute the code of 
behavior of the society. They represent the 
proper way to act, and, although they are not 
subjected to any rational or critical examination, 
there exists the conviction that the.y are the only 
right ways, the only ones fit to live by. The 
mores, says Sumner,^ who first analyzed them, 
are " the ])opular usages and traditions, when 
they include a judgment that they are conducive 
to societal welfare, and when they exert a coercion 
on the individual to conform to them, although 
they are not coordinated by any autliority." It 
is just as well to have a technical term for them, 
for they are not precisely customs, or social habi- 
tudes, or ethics, or morals. 

They become uniform and universal in a group, 

1 In "Folkways, A Study of the Sociological Importance 
of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals." 



50 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

and also imperative ; and, often over long periods, 
they are so resistive to change as to appear in- 
variable. Many of them are strongly sanctioned 
by religion; in fact, practically all of them that 
are of long standing are supported by the readi- 
ness of the spirits, ancestral or other, to punish 
infringement or alteration. They thus come to 
form a prescribed body of rules of behavior for 
life in society that well deserves the title of " the 
social code." 

I have already intimated that the mores extend 
beyond the range of self-maintenance. Within 
that range they determine how the struggle for 
existence and the competition of life shall go on, 
thus rising to meet and cope with certain vital 
and perennial life-conditions. Another inescap- 
able and vital life-condition is laid down in the 
bisexuality of the human race; there are the re- 
lations of the sexes to be ordered, in the interst 
of the society's well-being. Innumerable mores 
attend to the relations of man and woman, 
parents and children, and they work out into 
various forms of marriage and the family. A 
big group of mores always surrounds some vital 
condition of society life, like that of sex, and 
forms the approved method of dealing with it. 
Another such condition, for further example. 



FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 51 

was felt in the vividly conceived presence of a 
world of ghosts and spirits, an imao^inary envi- 
ronment to which men adjusted themselves by 
the unplanned development of a set of mores 
covering forms of avoidance, exorcism, concilia- 
tion, and propitiation. 

But these several sets of mores, " mere cus- 
tom '' at first, gradually attained a stage of organ- 
ization where they became institutions, as, for 
example, matrimony and religion. There is no 
human institution that has not risen from the 
matrix of custom, and the rise of new institu- 
tions now as always, is out of the same prolific 
source. And, as they take more definite form 
and somewhat disengage themselves from the 
mass of custom, the institutions do not lose, but 
cany with them, that approval and that convic- 
tion as to their indispensability for welfare that 
were accorded to the mores. Anything that is in 
our mores is right, and so our institutions are 
the best. " The mores," says Sumner again, 
" can make anything right and prevent condem- 
nation of anything." They are the approved 
ways of meeting the conditions of living, de- 
veloped, accepted, and practiced without the in- 
tervention of reasoned purpose. 

They are to a society what, for example, dens- 



52 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

ity and color of fur are to arctic animals; namely 
automatic adaptations to environment. Life- 
conditions are present and society has to live 
under them. This is rendered possible, or easy, 
or easier, by adjustments in the manner of life or 
ways of living. Thus we have a societal code 
characteristic, for instance, of the arctics or of 
the tropics, of isolation or accessibility, of over- 
population or under-population, of the country 
or of the city, of peace or of war. 

Adaptation is the characteristic result of the 
process of organic evolution. It is also, though 
this is less commonly recognized, that of the pro- 
cess of societal evolution. It is never perfect; 
and, since life-conditions are always changing, it 
is never stable. Maladjustment recurs, to be fol- 
lowed by new adjustment by way of altered mores 
and institutions. This recurring adjustment is 
secured, in nature, through the operation of three 
factors : variation, selection, and heredity, all of 
which act, of course, automatically. By varia- 
tion, diversity is secured : the members of the 
new generation are not precisely like those of the 
old, nor are they all duplicates of one another. 
By heredity, on the other hand, a general likeness 
is retained as between parents and offspring, and 
as among the several offspring. Heredity is the 



FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 53 

conservative element. By selection the least 
adapted of any generation are weeded out, leav- 
ing the best adapted to survive. These latter are 
the " fittest." 

A similar process, arriving at the same result, 
namely, adjustment to life-conditions, takes place 
in the life of society. Variation produces di- 
versity in the mores and in the institutions crys- 
tallizing out of them; tradition, corresponding 
to heredity in the organic world, holds the type 
of the mores, as they are passed along; and 
selection weeds out the less expedient mores and 
institutions. The evolutionary process is, how- 
ever, on another plane than that of organic 
evolution, and in a different mode. Its exist- 
ence has been long recognized in an unconscious 
sort of way; for writers on society's life have fre- 
quently spoken of " social heredity " or " social 
selection," just as generations of naturalists 
before Darwin spoke of " families " of plants or 
animals — not realizing that such terms were 
more than metaphorical, or better than analogies. 
To make use of the point of view here taken, it 
is necessary to be resolved as to the nature of 
variation, selection, and transmission as factors 
in societal evolution. 

Variation in the mores represents a series of 



54 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

tentatives, departing more or less from the ac- 
cepted code, that are struck out upon by individ- 
uals in the pursuit of their interests. The in- 
dividual's function is that of an agency for 
variation. These slight departures from the 
code are in evidence all the time; in fact, the 
society's code is a sort of average or mean or type, 
about which cluster the codes of classes, sects, 
and other larger and smaller sub-groups. The 
individual may adhere to a number of these sub- 
groups, as his interests dictate. He may belong, 
for instance, to the miners' union, the Baptist 
church, the Socialist party, the Masonic lodge, 
at one and the same time. When interests 
change, other and new codes may appear, some 
of them departing widely in character, perhaps, 
from the general or typical code of the society 
at large. In general, the rise of such variations 
is a consequence of discomfort under the pre- 
vailing code; interests strain toward a better 
realization by way of change, small or great. 

Such variations may be short-lived and ex- 
hibited by only a few, or there may be a con- 
currence of many which carries them forward 
until, perhaps, the code of the society at large 
has been profoundly modified. Some of the vari- 
ations live and some die out. Here is the fact 



FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 55 

of selection. All through history, codes and 
institutions have appeared, have persisted for 
a time, and have been altered or have passed 
completely away. Since the topic of selection, 
and in particular selection by war, is the main 
interest in this present discussion, I should pre- 
fer for the moment merely to record the fact of 
selection, leaving the consideration of the process 
for special examination. 

Transmission of the mores is by tradition, 
which, I repeat, corresponds, in the societal 
realm, to heredity in the organic. Tradition, 
like heredity, tends to repeat the type. It is 
brought about through imitation, either spon- 
taneous or induced. Spontaneous imitation is 
a natural activity, common to animals and man, 
and especially marked, among human beings, in 
the young. The receiver of the mores, thus trans- 
mitted, wants to receive, and takes the initiative 
in the transfer, as when the small boy apes his 
father. But imitation is also capable of being 
induced, where there is no likelihood that it will 
be spontaneous, by precept and discipline. This 
is education, in its broadest sense. The receiver 
may be indifferent or even unwilling to receive, 
and the giver commonly takes the initiative, as, 
for example, in the " uplifting " of a " lower " 



56 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

race. Also, while spontaneous imitation carries 
all the mores indiscriminately, education carries 
a more or less wisely selected body of mores. It 
is clear that the former is the more natural, ele- 
mental, impersonal, spontaneous, and automatic 
process; the latter is effective as it succeeds in 
reproducing the essentials, at least in semblance, 
of the former, but in c()nji)arison it appears arti- 
ficial. It involves, it has been noted, an ante- 
cedent choice or selection from the main body of 
the mores : we will teach the young certain things 
and others we will tr-y to keep from them as long 
as possible. This choice is supposed to be a rea- 
soned and purposeful one; but such a selection 
has little of the sureness and severe correctness 
of an automatic selection. 

These evolutionary factors are operative in 
the life of eveiy society, from the family group 
to the nation. And they do not stop there. 
They are effective, on the grand scale, in the life 
of Human Society as a whole. There is a world- 
code that has been in process of formation with 
the establishment of proximity between the na- 
tions; for that proximity, brought about by the 
" annihilation of distance," has meant altered 
conditions of life for many societies; and varia- 
tions that have been demonstrated, under selec- 



FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 57 

tion, to be expedient, have been transmitted 
until enough mores have come to be held in 
common by all, or nearly all, to justify the term 
" international code " or " world-code." Varia- 
tions around this code, or in departure from it, 
may now be originated by a whole nation, and 
submitted for world-wide acceptance or rejec- 
tion. Slavery, for example, has been rejected, 
while democracy has widened its range. And 
of late stands forth Germany, as champion of 
a code that is even now undergoing the ordeal 
of selection. These national variations on the 
world-code cannot be tested up as soon as, or 
shortly after, they appear — as iMormonism was 
tested lip on the American national code — and 
the process of selection is the more imposing 
when it comes. We turn now to a survey of the 
essentials of the selective process. 



VII. CONFLICT AN ESSENTIAL TO SELEC- 
TION: PEACEFUL COMPETITION 

The idea of the variation and transmission of 
a societal code is readily grasped, though it 
should not be thought that these factors work out 
in a simple and obvious manner. But there is 
more difficulty with selection. The term itself 
causes some trouble, for there is about it a conno- 
tation of '' choosing '' which darkens counsel. In 
organic evolution there cannot be, of course, any 
question of choice; the results of natural selec- 
tion are attained by elimination of the mal- 
adapted, not by any positive process. The " fit " 
are those that are left after the rest have been 
disposed of. The whole process is impersonal 
and automatic, in its entirety. Similarly with 
the most important manifestations of societal 
selection, if not with them all. In any case, it is 
necessary to start out with the idea of selection 
by way of elimination rather than with the mis- 
leading positive conception of selection as pick- 
ing and choosing. Variations around the code 
appear and come to the test. Those that cannot 

58 



CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 59 

qualify as expedient adjustments tend to pass 
away, and the rest remain because nothing is 
done to them. The " fit " variations in the 
mores, like the fit organisms, are let alone to run 
their course. Thus the term " selection/' as used 
in evolutionary systems, has a special sense and 
must be so understood. 

Essential to the operation of selection is con- 
flict. Conflict involves competition, and with- 
out it there is no test. Thus natural selection 
could not take place were it not for the struggle 
for existence out of which the better adapted 
forms emerge as the rest perish. Highly devel- 
oped specimens of organic life do not appear 
under isolation, but under conditions of com- 
petition; not in Australia, for example, but 
in Asia. This situation is duplicated in the 
societal realm, for no isolated people ever de- 
veloped an advanced code, that is, a high civili- 
zation. Compare Mesopotamiau culture, for 
instance, with that of Tierra del Fuego. But 
where numbers of human beings come into con- 
tact a competitive conflict is bound to occur; 
for all are trying to satisfy wants, and the satis- 
factions are too few to go round. Also it is 
characteristic of wants that they increase with 
the satisfaction of them ; if at one instant of time 



60 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

all human wants were stilled, the next instant 
would reveal many more emerging, that could 
not be met. So that, in the pursuit of their 
interests, both individuals and societies are sure 
to fall into conflict. It is this conflict that 
brings codes of conduct and policies of living to a 
test and a selection. 

But the mores and codes cannot fight one 
another. If we speak of the conflict of mili- 
tarism and industrialism, we are using a flgure 
of speech. The conflict is not between codes or 
institutions, but between the societies adhering 
to them. If the battle goes to the bearers of a 
certain code, that code is extended and strength- 
ened in influence ; if against them, it is weakened 
and may be eliminated altogether. It is the 
issue of the conflict that is decisive. 

The conflict is of various types: military, 
industrial, commercial, political ; but it is always 
a struggle to realize interests, \yhat is wanted 
is the power to supj)ort rights to something, such 
as the franchise, a " place in the sun,'' and so on. 
We have a right to do a thing when the rest will 
hold off and let us have it; but they will not 
hold off unless they are under some compulsion 
to do so. The power — militar}', civil, moral, 
or other — established as the result of struggle, 



CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 61 

is that compulsion. What people want above all, 
barring only existence itself, is the right to 
realize a standard of living. This is a matter of 
detail-enterprise, but for a society it amounts to a 
slight or a considerable idealization upon the liv- 
ing its members are used to ; it comes to involve 
an extension of the local code, with certain re- 
finements upon it. But such an objective readily 
brings two classes in the same nation or two 
nations into conflict over their codes, for in- 
stance over autocracy as against democracy. 
Thus the codes themselves furnish a cause of war. 
They are the more likely to do that because, in 
the conviction that "our" ways are the only 
right ones, we are wont to regard those of others 
as ridiculous, perverse, altogether wrong, or even 
contemptible. This sentiment of group-egotism 
is called ethnocentrism. 

It is plain, without going for the present into 
greater detail, that there are always occasions 
enough for conflict between societies. Now the 
crudest form of such conflict is common to both 
animals and men; it is by physical violence. 
This form is the one specifically before us, and 
must be looked into with some care; I should 
like to set it aside with that purpose in view 
while surveying first the milder forms of human 



62 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

conflict. There is some advantage in consider- 
ing the more evolved peaceful forms first, when 
we are studying a ease of recurrence, in war, of 
the less evolved. This is, in effect, putting the 
cai't before the horse, so far as evolutionary 
sequence goes; for all other types of competi- 
tion are, at least among civilized peoples, modi- 
fications of an antecedent violence. They have 
been, in their time, variations on the code of 
violent conflict, and they have been subjected to 
selection. The fact that they have survived that 
test indicates that they are more expedient as 
adjustments to evolved life-conditions of societies 
than is their parent stock. But it should be 
noted that no evolutionary adjustments are j^er- 
manent; their persistence under given condi- 
tions proves nothing about their expediency 
should conditions change — change back, for in- 
stance, to resemble more primitive ones. For 
while softened conditions can be met by gentler 
expedients, a recurrence of harsh conditions calls 
for a return to rough and crude forms of adjust- 
ment. 

In considering the milder forms of conflict 
we encounter at once a broad adjustment which 
is a pre-condition to their development. This is 
the *' peace-group " otherw^ise called the " in- 



CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 63 

group " or the " we-groiip " — a phenomenon 
which repays close examination. A peace-group 
is composed of members who have enough in- 
terests in common to allow of cooperation rather 
than conflict in their realization. They have a 
common code — common, that is, in the essen- 
tials; there is no conflict over the vital things, 
for they are assumed in the common code, and 
disputes over minor matters can be carried on, 
generally, without breach of the peace by recourse 
to violence. *' Men will always fight," it is said, 
" when they are mad enough '' ; but in this case 
the matters concerning which they could get 
mad enough are agreed upon by all fellow-mem- 
bers, so that they do not have to be fought about 
within the group; and over the issues of less 
weight, passion does not run so high. 

No one ever set out to invent a peace-group. 
It is a typically spontaneous, automatic, and 
impersonal development, and one with a very 
high survival value; for it is by peace and order 
within that a society is enabled to resist de- 
struction or to concentrate its strength in the 
pursuit of its interests against competitors. In 
fact, the very definition of a human society, as 
given above,^ implies internal peace as an indis- 

1 p. 47. 



64. THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

pensable condition. Thus the peace-group may 
be taken to be as old as humanity, and even 
older, for animals form true societies. But it 
appears in history as a moditication of an ante- 
cedent regime of violence. What we actually see 
in recorded time is a progressive development of 
restriction on violence, both as between individ- 
uals and classes within the same society, and 
also as between societies. But the vei^ prohibi- 
tion of violence witnesses to the priority of vio- 
lence. Tlie general tendency, where we know 
war to have been the mode, has been in the direc- 
tion of milder methods; there is no general or 
steady tendency in the opposite direction ; and 
so the conflict by violence appears to be a heritage 
from the antique world. War is often spoken 
of as a reversion. Nations, even when at war, 
take pains to cast the odium of recourse to such 
a savage expedient upon the enemy. Public 
opinion has long been rolling up against violence 
and in favor of peace; but that it was not al- 
ways so, can be gathered from the character of 
the heroes and divinities of olden time. Whether 
or not the primordial era was one of unmitigated 
violence, the extension of the peace-group, as seen 
in history, has represented a progressive modifi- 
cation of the ruder methods of conflict. 



CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 65 

The existence of a peace-group is dependent 
upon the adherence of its members to a common 
societal code; their major interests coincide and 
are being realized under adjustments to life- 
conditions represented by the code. There is 
a conviction that group-welfare depends upon 
the code, and there arises a loyalty to it and a 
partisanship that constitute patnotism. Such 
sentiments create cohesion and stability, and 
have, as we have seen, a high survival-value 
in any society's life. But this does not mean, 
we have already insisted, that the society's code 
remains forever the same. It is only tlie vital 
or salient mores that are held in common ; out- 
side of these is the inevitable variation, due to 
the non-uniform composition of the society. 
For every society or nation, however stable as 
a peace-group, includes classes, sects and other 
constituents, each of which has, as its truly dis- 
tinguishing feature, its special body of mores. 
The most essential of these mores receive rep- 
resentation in the national code; but there are 
minor interests enough to struggle for, in com- 
petition with other sub-groups. These compet- 
ing fellow-groups are also divisible into still 
smaller constituents, with still more special in- 
terests and still more specialized rules of con- 



66 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

duct. There is endless chance for conflict, selec- 
tion, and adjustment within the peace-group. It 
is clear that as the different local bodies unite to 
form the larger ones, and as they all finally join 
to make up the society or nation, the number of 
mores common to the unions must become ever 
smaller and their form more general. The 
residue to which all peaceably adhere are the few 
and general essentials of the inclusive code; the 
conflict is about minor matters and is pursued 
in a milder way. 

I do not wish to load these pages with abstrac- 
tions or generalities not bearing directly upon 
my main topic, nor yet with needless illustra- 
tion. The milder methods of social conflict do 
not form the main subject of this writing, and are 
to be treated only as they throw light upon war- 
selection. However, it must be understood that 
war-selection comes about, in these days, when 
the milder methods break down ; and it is there- 
fore necessary to summon up a quite clear and 
definite impression of how the milder methods 
have been evolved and what they can and can- 
not do, in order to see where war comes in. 

Perhaps the generalities of a code upon which a 
whole nation agrees, as distinguished from details 
of lesser importance, may be best brought out by 



CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 67 

a quotation ^ — in which the emphasis upon the 
impersonal and automatic in the formation and 
acceptance of a national code should be noted. 
" The rights of conscience, the equality of all 
men before the law, the separation of church and 
state, religious toleration, freedom of speech and 
of the press, popular education, are vital tradi- 
tions of the American people. They are not 
brought in question ; they form the stock of firm 
and universal convictions on which our national 
life is based; they are ingrained into the char- 
acter of our people, and you can assume, in any 
controversy, that an American will admit tlieir 
truth. But they fonn the sum of traditions 
which we obtain as our birthright. They are 
never explicitly taught to us, but we assimilate 
them in our earliest childhood from all our sur- 
roundings, at the fireside, at school, from the 
press, on the highways and streets. We never 
hear them disputed and it is only when we ob- 
serve how difficult it is for some foreign nations 
to learn them that we perceive that they are not 
implanted by nature in the human mind. They 
are a part and the most valuable part of our na- 
tional inheritance, and the obligation of love, 
labor, and protection which we owe to the nation 

1 Sumner, W. G., " Collected Essays," III, 353-354. 



68 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

rests upon these benefits which we receive from 
it." 

Agreeing with respect to these generalities — 
accepting them, in fact, without reflection — 
Americans experience in the rest of the national 
life a series of collisions of minor interests : some 
have wanted protectionism, others free trade; 
some an imperialistic policy, others the tradi- 
tional policy of isolation. A long series of in- 
terests, lined up for the fray, could be mentioned : 
labor vs. capital, debtors vs. creditors, gold-stand- 
ardists vs. inflationists, suffragists vs. anti-suf- 
fragists, " wets " vs. " drys "; and, on the smaller 
scale, religious sects, secret societies, and local 
organizations of all descriptions maintain an 
unremitting competition among themselves. 
Viewed from this angle, national life is a seeth- 
ing arena of conflict, industrial, commercial, 
political, religious, moral, full of petty or more 
than petty triumphs and reverses, entailing ex- 
tensions and eliminations of petty or more than 
petty codes of behavior. 

It remains to note that each smaller group is 
trying all the time to universalize its pet 
program, and that there is always the possibility 
that it may acquire a following sufficient to raise 
its code into a prominence from which it can chal- 



CONFLICT ESSENTIAL TO SELECTION 69 

lenge some of the essentials of the national code. 
If, then, there comes about a conflict over es- 
sentials, there is in prospect a selection that may 
demand revolution, probably violence, and so the 
suspension or even the destruction of the peace- 
status itself. Slavery in the South was for a 
long time a minor national issue; but it rose 
into prominence, got in among the essentials, 
so that the nation could not exist half-slave and 
half-free, and was finally eliminated by recourse 
to war. If any local issue works up into such 
prominence, it transcends peaceful settlement. 
People have become, with the successive thwart- 
ing of interests believed by them to be essential, 
angry enough to fight; and as yet there is no 
peaceful device that has stood the test as a sub- 
stitute for violence. Not for nothing has war 
been called the ultima ratio. War has always 
been and is now the last expedient in bringing 
about selection in the mores, and any other form 
of conflict may run out into war. 



VIII. PUBLIC OPINION AND THE 
NATIONAL CODE 

The code of any peace-group must contain, of 
necessity, taboos on violence, and also upon con- 
duct likely to lead to violence; otherwise the 
existence of the group would always be in 
jeopardy. " Thou shalt not kill " and " thou 
shalt not steal " are such taboos. Any member 
who transgresses these formulations of adjust- 
ment to life-conditions is removed from the group 
or some attempt is made to force him into har- 
mony. The code of any peace-group whatsoever 
must contain these taboos as a condition of being 
a peace-group ; this has l)een tested over and over 
throughout human history^ has become tradi- 
tional, and is never questioned. Other items in 
the code of a modern nation, such as freedom of 
conscience, are of much later development, having 
been acquired within the recent historic period. 
No variations are permitted that may tend to 
weaken these fundamentals ; in fact, every varia- 
tion is tested on the criterion of its consistency 

70 



PUBLIC OPINION 71 

with the fundamentals. Thus is many a pro- 
posed law declared unconstitutional, that is, in- 
consistent with the national principles, or the 
genius of national institutions. 

But where the fundamentals of the code are not 
obviously in question, a flexible and adaptable 
societal system will show free and versatile va- 
riation. Such variability has a high selective 
value, for its presence means a heightened chance 
of securing, through comparison of multiplied ex- 
pedients, a speedy and adequate adjustment. 
But that result cannot come about unless un- 
hampered freedom of expression is accorded to 
the producers of any new expedient for living, 
whereby they may seek to oft'er it for imitation 
and concurrence, spontaneous or induced, in com- 
petition with other variations. I have said that 
such competition aims at power, political or 
other ; but that power can be gained only by win- 
ning over public opinion. Now, public opinion is 
commonly supposed to be responsive to reason, 
and people wlio accept that supposition are led 
to lay much stress upon reasoned and purposeful 
individual initiative as a moving force in societal 
evolution. If such a position is sound, then 
society practices a rational selection among its 
mores, and therefore a rational adjustment to its 



72 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

life-conditions. It is necessary to reflect upon 
this matter before we go on. 

In conceiving of public opinion we are all in- 
clined to think of it as the opinion of our own 
circle of life, and if one's circle is composed chiefly 
of educated people, as is generally the case with 
any theoretical writer, he is apt to assume that 
public opinion includes a large element of the in- 
tellectual or of the rationally discriminative. 
But genuine public opinion cannot be anything 
else than the consensus of the whole society ; and 
the vast bulk of any society is composed of so- 
called " common people,'' not at all or not very 
well educated, of horizons much limited, and 
without the time, surplus energy, or even capacity 
or willingness to grapple intellectually with 
broad and general issues. This is no indictment 
of those who form the solid strength of any 
society ; in fact there are not a few of those who 
are regarded as intellectuals because of eminence 
in certain restricted fields, who are both artless 
and child-like when they set out to pass judgment 
on the societal order. The scope of any human 
intellect is circumscribed. Few men can deal in- 
telligently with the broadest issues of societal ad- 
justment. There is no immediate test or verifi- 
cation to go by, and it is generally only after the 



PUBLIC OPINION 78 

issue is long past that the " verdict of history," 
the only sure one, can be rendered. 

Public opinion, in brief, is a matter of feeling 
rather than of intellect; and the feeling is de- 
veloped in connection with a more or less 
localized interest. If such interests are being 
realized, public opinion is favorable to or acqui- 
escent in the societal order ; if not, there is " un- 
rest " and a threat of conflict to secure change. 
Men adjust consciously only to what they can 
see, or visualize, or think they see. This may be 
thoroughly irrational, as with the primitive peo- 
ple, who have a whole set of adjustments to a 
world of ghosts and demons — a construction 
that can withstand none of our accepted tests of 
reality. 

And yet it is possible to contend that public 
opinion is prevailingly " right " — even that the 
vow populi is the vox dei. Public opinon sup- 
ported primitive religions. We cannot at all 
agree with the assumptions upon which it rested. 
But the religions were of the highest societal ef- 
fectiveness, constituting as they did, among other 
things, a powerful disciplinary factor just when 
and where discipline was most needed. They 
had a high survival- value and public sentiment 
was " right " in supporting them. Society auto- 



74 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

matically used the public opinion, intellectually 
mistaken as it was, with the result of securing 
adaptation to conditions that really existed, and 
to them as they existed. Men in those elder ages 
never saw the societal expediency of their re- 
ligion ; it was all the time being put to uses quite 
other than those the contemplation of which had 
won it the favor of the public. No matter 
whence or how they arose, or how they were 
viewed by the individual mind, primitive re- 
ligious institutions represented a real adjust- 
ment to life-conditions, and therefore persisted, 
surviving all sorts of selective tests along their 
course. 

I do not wish to say that enlightenment has not 
enabled a modern society to proceed more in- 
telligently and consciously toward its destiny; 
but any one who faces the facts will have to con- 
clude that intelligent and conscious action is 
still, among the masses of mankind, confined for 
the most part to local issues and even to personal 
exigencies. The wider view is the rare view; it 
is, for example, the view of the statesman as con- 
trasted with that of the " practical politician." 
Most of us are but little concerned in action that 
contemplates a distant or universal result; few 



PUBLIC OPINION 75 

people can take a deep intelligent interest in a 
social program, like that of eugenics, which aims 
at an improvement of the whole human race some 
centuries hence. The human tendency is to 
shrink such a jirogram down to a proximate, im- 
mediate aim ; to make it bear on the present 
situation, and upon the local interest of the ad- 
herent. 

Certainly the adjustment of a nation's code, not 
to say that of a race, to life-conditions is one of 
those matters that transcend the mental outfit 
and powers of most, if not of all men. How, 
then, can public opinion be trusted to settle such 
an issue? The answer is, because the process is 
typically automatic and impersonal, of a larger 
potency than any intellect-directed process can 
be, and must of necessity work out into adjust- 
ment. 

Consider the adjustment secured by natural 
selection, which is so apt that it was at first un- 
hesitatingly ascribed to infinite intelligence, and 
so rational in its outcome that the best brains of 
mankind have been employed for centuries in 
simply following out the process and seeing how 
it was done. Science has limped along after 
natural fact; after the act it has offered, at 



76 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

length, its rational explanation; but would it 
trust itself, even now, to vie with the process 
which it has followed and learned? 

What science has learned is how things are and 
how they go, in the natural order. These pro- 
cesses cannot be altered, but they can be fallen in 
with, or adjusted to, with the result of human 
well-being. There is here no negation of the 
value of human knowledge and of action in its 
light. And the case is similar in the societal 
realm. The process, here too, is " riglit " as the 
natural process is " right " because it is of the 
same impersonal, elemental nature. The test is, 
in one case as in the other, the magnificently 
simple and conclusive one of persistence or non- 
persistence. Our business is to learn how things 
are and how they go, in the societal order; these 
processes, like the natural ones, cannot be 
altered, l)ut we can fall in with them, or adjust to 
them, with the result of societal well-being. 

Recurring now to public opinion, which comes 
near to being the elemental force in societal evo- 
lution, we find it based upon sentiment and in- 
terest rather tlian upon intellectual analyses of 
complicated conditions. Upon interest — but 
here is precisely the touchstone of society's ad- 
justments : do they subserve interests or do they 



PUBLIC OPINION 77 

not? Each local group, while incompetent to 
survey the interests of the whole society, is clear 
enough upon its own immediate status, for it has 
to live from day to day in that status, and it 
knows without much cerebration whether life is 
comfortable or not. It is the only agency that 
can pass upon that question; for it is well-nigh 
impossible for a member of one group to see the 
life in another as a member of the latter sees it. 
If each group is to judge of its own interests, the 
responsibility lies precisely where the real ex- 
perience is. The resulting inferences as to what 
ought to be done may be wrong; in fact, through 
the suggestion of interested parties a group or 
class may be persuaded that it has cause for dis- 
content when none would be felt if it had been let 
alone ; but it is just the virtue of the automatic 
process that under it such unrealities at once en- 
counter, along with the realities, an unplanned 
test by conflict. If there is anything in proposed 
variations of the code, it will come out, at length ; 
if there are only phantasms, they will be dis- 
sipated under the test. If all the interests, 
locally felt and locally defended, have their 
chance within the arena marked out by the limits 
set in the code of the inclusive society, the com- 
posite product of the consequent selection, neither 



78 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

foreseen nor planned by any one, will represent a 
more expedient adjustment for the whole society. 
And if the arena is too narrow, or the restriction 
too cramping, that too will take care of itself; 
the pressure of discontented groups is bound to 
increase under repression until the conflict issues 
in a revolutionary modification of the broader 
outlines of the society's code, or even in the 
violent disruption of the peace-group itself. Ad- 
justment to life-conditions is a necessity of life, 
for organism or society. It is bound to come. 

The peace-group, as we have seen, is an ex- 
pedient for living whose efficacy is unquestioned 
by any one except, perhaps, certain crazy anar- 
chists. But its adaptability, through freedom 
accorded to public opinion, has been a matter of 
growth. At an early period in the world's his- 
tory it was not in the mores to allow of the free 
expression of general opinion. " Sit down thy- 
self and cause the rest of the people to sit down," 
suggests Odysseus, blandly, to the excited noble, 
" for not yet dost thou clearly know what is the 
mind of the son of Atreus " ; but with the common 
man he uses harsher measures, and thunders : 
" Sit still and harken to the words of others who 
are your betters! On no account shall all the 
Achseans be king here. Not good is the rule of 



PUBLIC OPINION 79 

many; one is to be leader, one is to be king." 
Yet even in Homer's time, and in war, the as- 
sembly of the people could make itself felt by 
peaceable means, even though the threat of vio- 
lence lay not far away. 

The course of civilization has been marked by a 
progressive enlargement of the range of expres- 
sion accorded to the popular will. This has as- 
sured the stability of peace-groups to a higher and 
higher degree, for it has amounted to enlarged 
opportunity for the realization of interests with- 
out resort to violence. It is the justification for 
a freedom of speech almost bordering upon li- 
cense, that popular discontent may thus blow it- 
self off into thin air and do no such damage as 
it might if confined. Limitation of freedom of 
expression is popular only when the group-code 
and the sentiment of patriotism supporting it are 
endangered and ou^traged. 

Formerly, then, there was little apparatus for 
the expression of public opinion. The society 
was conceived to be in the hands of its rulers. 
Theoretically the Homeric king was the only per- 
son who had a right to speak, even in the as- 
sembly, and if any one else wanted the floor, he 
had the privilege conferred upon him by being 
handed the royal scepter. The assembly of all 



80 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

tribal members, in earlier European times, often 
had no other mode of exi)ression than applause or 
silence in the face of an announcement of intent. 
But this state of inarticulateness was succeeded 
by the evolution of various devices, into the de- 
tail of which we need not go, which limited the 
power of the ruler by allowing registration of 
the popular will. When the king ceased to be a 
religious fetish and lost " divine right,'' there 
fell away, for the emancipated peoples, a formid- 
able barrier to the free expression of public 
opinion. 

The modern form of adjustment in this matter 
of enfranchising public opinion is democracy, 
where, as the etymology of the term indicates, 
recognition is accorded to no ruler at all except 
the demos or people. But no society can get 
along without an executive of its will. There 
has always been an executive of the society's 
code ; the only difference between types of execu- 
tive worth mentioning in this connection has lain 
in the degree of responsibility imposed. The 
executive is but a man, and he belongs to some 
class in the society. If not responsible, he may 
try to impose a capricious personal will or the 
special code of his class. As a matter of fact, 
there was always a limit to this sort of thing, 



PUBLIC OPINION 81 

even if it had to be established by assassination. 
Deposition of some sort has been common enough 
under unlimited monarchies. Under the consti- 
tutional monarchy, the constitution or charter 
of rights laid down the essentials of the national 
code, and the executive was held responsible for 
its defense and upholding, as well as limited to 
action within it. If he or his class abused their 
position of power to tamper with the code of 
rights, there was always the expedient of revo- 
lution. But, in the recession from violence or 
from situations fraught with the threat of vio- 
lence, all of which menaced the very peace-group 
itself, the device of "peaceful revolution," or 
election, arose as a better adjustment. Nowa- 
days the executive — president or premier — is 
subject to periodic examination at the bar of 
public opinion ; the issue is as to whether he has 
executed its mandates or not. Meanwhile the 
king, where there is one, is a survival except as 
he symbolizes continuity, and in some other rela- 
tively unimportant respects. 

The election, though it is associated with per- 
sons, is essentially a selection in the details of 
the national code — details surrounding the un- 
questioned essentials to which allusion has 
several times been made. Some elections are 



82 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

frankly the decision of an issue, as, for example, 
woman-suffrage; and the party platforms some- 
times make a clear presentation of an issue, as 
where protection and free trade have stood over 
against one another. A party espouses a certain 
type of societal policy and draws its adherents 
from certain well-recognized groups in the popu- 
lation that have, or think they have, interests in 
common. A revolt against the traditional code 
may bring about a new alignment, as in the case 
of the Progressives. However, when certain 
men have been elected, while it is understood 
that their special policies are to prosper with 
them, they are yet bound to uphold the national 
code and to look after the essential interests of 
all their constituents, of whatever political faith. 
The representatives are those to whom is dele- 
gated, so far as their constituencies go, the 
selective power of public opinion, but the dele- 
gating body can hold them responsible, for it 
has regularly recurring opportunities to con- 
tinue or discontinue its representatives. The 
move toward the referendum and recall indicates 
discontent with the traditional system of repre- 
sentation, and impatience over having to wait 
awhile for a chance to rebuke and change repre- 
sentatives. It is an important new variation at 



PUBLIC OPINION 83 

the end of a long line of development, some of 
whose intervening phases we have reviewed, 
stretching from an era of restriction of the popu- 
lar voice toward ever greater freedom. 

Election is the typical modern method by which 
societal selection is accomplished within the 
peace-group, and an altered adjustment is 
attained. It is not asserted, however, that a 
single such expression of public opinon must be 
" right." The candid examination of an Ameri- 
can election ^ makes one dubious as to the effi- 
cacy of public opinion to secure expedient societal 
adjustments by this method. It can be swayed 
to a considerable extent by interested and un- 
scrupulous parties; let one refer to Lecky on 
the function of the demagogue in a democracy,^ 
or to Sumner on " Legislation by Clamor." ^ 
But we have as yet no surer device for apprais- 
ing public sentiment within a peace-group. It 
is needful for any one who wishes to see what 
there is in any evolutionary process to realize 
that much has been done in the lapse of time 
which we cannot perceive going on under our 

1 For a brief account of the election as a method of societal 
selection, see Keller, "Societal Evolution," pp. 105-114. 

2 " Democracy and Liberty," I, 22-23. 

3 In "Collected Essays," III, 186-187. 



84, THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

eyes. We have gained man}^ an expedient ad- 
justment of societ}' at the hand of public opinion 
when, to contemporaries, it appeared that the 
popular will, in the contradictoriness of its ex- 
pressions, practically cancelled out. A societal 
process must be allowed its time and be viewed 
over a long perspective ; it should not be judged 
by a series of isolated and perhaps erratic swings. 
Only it cannot be accredited with purposeful 
rationality in the attainment of adjustments, 
and least of all can it be referred to the indi- 
vidual. It shows a general trend and some 
very actual results, when viewed over a long 
enough course and in perspective. 

Evolution does not produce perfection. It 
does not even bring forth a superlative, but only 
comparatives. Before des])airing, or even pass- 
ing judgment, one should always compare the 
contemporary evolutionary product with what 
went before. Defective as the election is, in iso- 
lated instances, one would be a bold man to ad- 
vocate going back to the theory and practice out 
of which this less restrained expression of public 
opinion once developed. On the face of it, and 
in short perspective, the lodgment of power in a 
few individuals, or even in one autocrat, seems 



PUBLIC OPINION 85 

to attain an efficiency toward which a democ- 
racy vainly strains. And yet, to go back to a 
monarchical system would be to return to a su- 
perseded societal form. 



IX. THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE- 
GKOUP 

Hitherto the peace-group has been taken to 
include, at most, a nation, and the social code to 
be, at its widest, a national code. But the 
peace-group has shown an ampler extension than 
this ; empires have become veritable peace-groups, 
when covered by a Marjna Pax Romana or a 
Magna Pax Britannica. With such cases in 
mind the conception of the peace-group may be 
much expanded. But I do not want to stop 
short, in the present instance, of the widest prac- 
ticable application and implication of much that 
has been set down in preceding pages. Of course 
if " human brotherhood " is ever realized, the 
peace-group will be coterminous with the world. 
However, not to consider Utopias, let us put some 
such question as this : Have not civilized na- 
tions, at least temporarily, actually formed a 
grand peace-group ; and is there not in existence, 
even now, an international peace-group and also 
a code of civilized nations, covering essential in- 

86 



THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 87 

ternational adjustments, to which all civilized 
nations have at least professed adherence? 

Whether or not civilized nations have been at 
war for fully as much of their time in the modern 
period as in former ones,^ it appears that warfare 
between nations, where the contending parties 
have both been representatives of high civiliza- 
tion, has been progressively less frequent. And 
it certainly seems safe to say that war has not 
taken place over such a variety of issues, some 
of them relatively trivial, as was formerly the 
case. It has not taken place at all, in recent 
times, without assertions of reluctance on both 
sides and without mutual accusations, between 
the enemies, of having transgressed certain tra- 
ditional norms of conduct. Such transgression 
must constitute, it is assumed, in the eyes of all 
civilized peoples, guilt deserving of punishment. 
Peace is in the international mores; whatever 
may be said of the actuality of war, the tradition 
respecting international relations of civilized 
peoples assumes a peace unbroken save under the 
most exceptional circumstances. The fact that 
" confidence-men " attain success is no proof that 
most people are dishonest ; quite the reverse, for 
that success is attained because people confide in 

1 See Woods and Baltzly, " I3 War Diminishing? " 



88 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

one another's honesty. Germany's doings do not 
witness the non-existence of an international 
code, but prove rather tliat most nations were 
depending upon such a code, with its tradition 
of international conduct, as on a very real and 
trustworthy thing. 

In so far as this tradition has represented the 
facts, the civilized nations have formed an inter- 
national peace-group; and even when the tradi- 
tion has not been followed by all, it has yet borne 
witness to a tendency towards the formation of 
sucli a group. The very circumstance that ap- 
peal was made, even hypocritically, to a tradi- 
tion of international behavior, indicates that a 
set of international mores has at least been in 
process of formation. There was no law to ap- 
peal to. It has been asserted with much justice 
that, despite university courses in the subject, 
there is no international law; but all civilized 
nations have recognized a body of international 
precedents, and there has even been an effort to 
legalize them by setting up an international tri- 
bunal. Evidently there has been rapprochement 
of an international nature, which exhibits all the 
essential marks of an at least incipient peace- 
group. This societal expedient, beginning in the 



THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 89 

primitive family, has extended to include tribe, 
nation, confederation and even empire; and it 
seems not yet to have exhausted its scope. The 
inteiTiational peace-group, if it has not arrived, 
is well along in the process of becoming. 

There is no inherent reason why the extension 
of the peace-group must be limited by national 
boundaries. It is an adaptation to conditions 
of living presented to human society; and if 
it has shown undoubted survival-value for ever 
larger and larger societies, and has successfully 
transcended boundary after boundary, the infer- 
ence is that there is no limit to its expediency 
set by the increasing size of the compounded 
societal group. But it is also evident that, since 
the peace-group is made possible only by the 
fact that its members possess essential mores and 
interests in common, so that they may all adhere 
to a broad code in the matter of the essentials of 
conduct, competing as respects minor interests 
without violence — it is evident, I say, that each 
extension of this group involves greater complex- 
ity and refinement of adjustment. The larger 
the peace-group, as we have seen, the fewer the 
mores held in common by all parties. The code 
of the large peace-group is composed of few 



90 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

items; more interests have to be settled by com- 
petition ; and so there is always more chance that 
violence will break out. 

One of the essentials of a stable peace-group is 
that its constituent parts shall understand each 
other, at least in a general way. This is one of 
the fundamental reasons for insisting upon a 
single national language; the peace-group that 
can place that one of the mores in its code adds 
immensely to its stability. Compare the British 
and the Dual Empires in the matter of their 
stability, and note the efforts of Germany to 
further the assimilation of Alsace-Lorraine by 
forcing out the former tongue. But all such in- 
sistence upon homogeneity in the national unit 
accentuates its individuality; and tlint makes the 
formation of a larger international composite the 
more difficult. The more perfect the organiza- 
tion of the national peace-groups, and the more 
settled and definite their codes, the more trouble 
is there bound to be in the construction of an in- 
ternational peace-group. It is like trying to 
secure a general agreement among adult persons 
of pronounced convictions and individuality. 

Aside from the obvious difference in language, 
the separate nations have never understood one 
another very well, and their divergences have 



THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 91 

been emphasized by their ethnocentrism. No 
wonder, therefore, that the adjustment to civ- 
ilized society's life-conditions represented by an 
international peace-group is as yet an imperfect 
one. It could never have appeared at all except 
for the previous partial conquest of numerous 
barriers calculated to keep nations apart and un- 
able to understand one another. These barriers 
were such as prevented or hindered the inter- 
transmission of the mores, and their conquest was 
at the hand of agencies, for the most part auto- 
matically developed, which furthered such trans- 
mission. 

Of all the agencies which have brought groups 
of men into proximity so that they could know 
and learn from one another, become similar, 
tolerant, or even, at length, friendly, by far the 
most effective is trade. Doubtless the first 
peaceful meeting-ground of tribes and nations 
was the market. The development of trade has 
been a thoroughly and typically natural and auto- 
matic movement, directed by immediate self- 
interest and with no purpose in view except the 
realization of definite, material ends. Yet, al- 
though the trader directly and consciously 
assaulted no one of the barriers to peace and the 
mutual assimilation of codes, he ended by under- 



92 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

mining and leveling most of them. He trans- 
mitted products, then processes, then mores in 
general, between nation and nation. I need not 
go into the detail of this transmission, which 
resulted in a spreading similarit}^ in civilization 
and a consequent lessening of the feeling of 
strangeness and hostility. Other agencies of 
transmission operated along with trade, the most 
modern of these being, perhaps, the novel. 
Most people know little of Russia, for example, 
outside of what Turgenev, Dostoyevski, and other 
Russian writers have told them. The net result 
of" all the inter-transmission has been the possi- 
bility of the rapprochement of which I have 
spoken. When that possibility emerged, the au- 
tomatic drift of civilized nations was toward an 
agreement upon essentials, and a shifting of 
conflict from its violent pliase into an industrial, 
commercial, or other peaceable competition. 

This is, on the larger scale, what happened in 
the formation of the limited national peace- 
group. There are essentials upon whicli all com- 
bining elements at least profess to agree; then 
there are the minor matters concerning which 
they remain in constant, but peaceful conflict 
and competition. But nations are not so will- 



THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 93 

ing to sign away portions of their independence 
as are constituent groups within the same nation ; 
there is not the same mutual confidence, nor is 
there the same apparatus of centralization. 
Nearly all groups in this country are willing to 
abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court; 
but when it comes to an international court of 
arbitration, certain reservations are made, for 
example, touching questions of national " honor." 
No nation is sure that all of the essentials of its 
code are going to be represented in the official 
international code which such a court is de- 
signed to interpret. 

Each nation is concerned for its interests be- 
cause the comparatively few items of the inter- 
national code have to be stated in comprehensive 
and therefore somewhat vague terms, that seem 
susceptible of a variety of interpretations. And 
there has been developed no system for checking 
up the international authorities, in so far as they 
may be taken to exist at all. The whole organi- 
zation of the international peace-group is, in 
brief, inchoate and unstable, and public opinion, 
without reasoning that out, feels it and becomes 
wary of committing itself. Perhaps if there 
could have been a world-empire of some sort, 



94 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

corresponding to the original despotism of the 
group-chief, there would have been something 
definite and actual to limit and modify, as there 
was in the case of the smaller society. The case 
is always more natural where there is something- 
positive upon which to use negative, restrictive 
methods, than where there is something to build 
up out of chaotic materials. Most human insti- 
tutious are formed as the statue is freed from the 
rugged block, by hacking, and at length chiseling 
away the jagged corners and unlovely attach- 
ments that imprison the real figure, as someone 
has exi)ressed it, within the originally rude mass. 
Yet there has been, after all, in peace-group 
forming, something original and crude to hack at 
and to chisel down, and that was the general 
savagery of former international relations. The 
rude and shapeless block, in the case of any hu- 
man institution, has been always a chaotic mass 
of mores, and the drill and chisel have been the 
taboo. The taboo has been the great institution- 
shaper. Let us desert, for the time, the appar- 
ently dubious recent projects aimed at the crea- 
tion of an international peace-group, and look 
into the process from the other end, trjdng to fol- 
low somewhat up its line of evolution. This will 
lead us to consider the modification of the earlier 



THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 95 

forms toward what we have, rather than to spec- 
ulate upon what we can do, by taking thought, 
or to worry over what seems, in our disillusion- 
ment; impossible. 



X. THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 

We start, then, from the violent conflict be- 
tween tribes and nations and are to follow its 
modifications toward peaceful competition. Al- 
ways out of the war-element have sprung varia- 
tions making for peace; and, thougli we cannot 
always see the why and how, it is yet an unde- 
niable fact that they have survived and replaced 
mores of violence. The methods of the violent 
conflict itself have been altered toward mildness. 
Once warfare was like the chase and utterly un- 
regulated by any taboos. There was no warn- 
ing declaration, no quarter to the vanquished, 
no chivalry of any sort. Poisoned springs, 
poisoned thorns planted upright in the path, or 
poisoned weapons were common enough in war- 
practice. Any method was good that secured the 
result. But long ago all this was altered : then 
declaration came seldom to be omitted, prisoners 
were adopted or enslaved, and the duel or the 
gantlet gave a captive at least a theoretic chance. 
Odysseus could get no poison in Ephyre to anoint 
his arrows with, for the man to whom he applied 

96 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 97 

would not give, fearing the immortal gods. The 
other forms of poisoning, assaults without warn- 
ing, mutilation, torture, and many another sav- 
age custom were superseded. The rules of war 
were developed — rules that a proper man or 
tribe would not think of infringing. For most 
savage peoples war became, in a certain rude 
sense, a gentleman's game. Punctilios grew up 
along these lines until warfare became as hu- 
mane, courteous, and high-minded as such a 
practice could well be. 

There were developed also small oases or nuclei 
of peace, in the shape of truces for burying the 
dead or for other purposes, and treaties of 
alliance, offensive and defensive. In connection 
with trade, and sanctioned by religion, there grew 
up several types of peace : the market-peace, the 
temple-peace, the peace of God. The mutual 
suspicion that is revealed so significantly in 
" dumb barter " or " silent trade " was allayed, 
so that merchant and customer trusted them- 
selves in one another's proximity, even unarmed. 
Disputes came to be discussed and smoothed over, 
revenge for injuries sustained was commuted into 
property-payments. The apparatus, personnel, 
and methods of diplomacy began to appear. 
Numerous courteous forms of inter-group com- 



98 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

munication sprang up — forms often empty in 
the fact, but whose existence was significant of 
conciliation rather than of defiance or indif- 
ference. 

Further and more detailed agreements came 
to be made, as the centuries passed, concerning 
the occasions and methods of war-making, con- 
cerning trade in all its aspects, freedom of the 
seas, spheres of interest or influence, religion, 
extradition, immigration, copyright, the maOs, 
and thousands of other matters, smaller and 
greater. By many of the agreements of this 
order, and potentially by each of them, there was 
averted an unmistakable possibility of resort to 
arms. They were nearly all, therefore, in ef- 
fect taboos on violence, and, as such, construc- 
tive of peace. Among civilized nations they 
came gradually to constitute a series of tradi- 
tions or precedents, and behavior in accordance 
with this code became the mark of the civilized 
nation or a member thereof. 

Further transmission of the mores, possible 
now that nations might be at peace for pro- 
tracted periods, and might come, through the 
development of trade and communications, to be 
ever better acquainted with one another, led to 
concurrence of all in variations developed by 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 99 

some. The Germans speedily adopted the Ameri- 
can invention or process; the Americans visited 
the German cities to study their municipal ad- 
ministration ^\ith a view to adapting and adopt- 
ing it. Especially did the New World send 
students to the Old, to acquire learning and 
polish of manners. Many departments of socie- 
tal life, but especially the economic, took on an 
essential similarity over the civilized world. It 
was a case of concurrence in selected variations 
which, as the event proved, secured better adjust- 
ment to the life-conditions of the several societies. 

And among the sweeping adjustments was the 
democratic state, of which I have spoken ; free- 
dom of pul)lic opinion and the control by peoples 
of their own destinies, by way of parliamentary 
government, came to be the mode in the civilized 
world. 

In a still more general way, the evolution of 
society led toward the supersession of mediaeval 
methods resting upon suspicion of machiavellian 
policies on the part of the governments of fellow- 
nations. All interests could not be entrusted to 
general sentiments of mutual fairness, good-will, 
and friendship, however insistently these were 
voiced upon public occasions; but a nation's 
honor was supposed to be involved in the keeping 



100 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

of its voluntary engagements, and it was almost 
if not quite unheard-of that a government should 
not try to prove that it had been honorable, even 
tliough it had not. That degree, at least, of 
deference to the international code could be 
counted on. 

For there was here, in actuality, such a code. 
I have not aimed at exhaustiveness in the pre- 
ceding sketch of the mores that developed within 
the international group. The group was an im- 
perfect thing, and the code was not imperative 
in anything like the same degree as a national 
code with a government behind it. It could not 
be that, in the past or present, and may never 
be so. But it is plain enough that civilized 
nations have been long on the way toward an 
automatic ordering of their joint destiny — long 
on the way, to secure even so imperfect a result 
as the one before us, with the inferential pros- 
pect of remaining yet long on the way before it 
can be realized in any perfection — plainly, how- 
ever, on the way, if a long enough sweep of 
societal evolution is surveyed. 

Now it is possible to get a sense of the real 
existence of an international code by asking why 
a certain nation, say Turkey, has not been in- 
cluded within the concourse of civilization. The 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 101 

former Armenian massacres, together with many 
another sinister performance, have ruled her out. 
And why? Because such things are forbidden by 
the civilized code. Russia's pogroms, and the 
general character of her government, were hardly 
outweighed by certain positive qualifications. 
But Japan was of the group. The disqualifica- 
tions are easier to name than are the qualifica- 
tions for membership. It is a harder task to 
determine what conduct is consonant with a code 
than what is not; for the code, from the Deca- 
logue down, is couched, if reduced at all to form, 
in the negative — Thou shalt not. 

In general, it is to those same mores which 
enable a smaller society to hold together in 
adjustment to life-conditions that nations must 
cling, if they are to form, or while they form, 
even temporarily, a peace-group. We have seen 
that the two taboos on killing and stealing have 
had to be enforced as a condition of societal sur- 
vival. But all such taboos confer rights; the 
two just mentioned confer respectively the right 
to life and the right to property within the peace- 
group — not outside, for peace is preserved only 
within the boundaries, and it has always been 
laudable to kill and rob the member of the "out- 
group." Similarly, all the taboos connected 



102 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

with any code confer rights of one kind or an- 
other upon the adherents of the code, that is, the 
members of the peace-group in question. And 
there is a duty corresponding to each such right, 
imposed upon each group-member, namely, the 
obligation to support the right conferred. In a 
stable peace-group any member may be called 
upon to help enforce the code and punish the 
transgressor of it — to enforce and punish by 
violence, if need be. The extreme of individual 
punishment is always exclusion, permanent or 
for a term, from the society. The laws, being the 
crystallized part of the code, carry a threat of 
such punishment for conduct varying widely 
from the norm. Minor offenses against local 
codes are visited with ostracism, ridicule, and 
other milder penalties. 

It is now proposed to do something analogous 
in a wider field — something in the line of en- 
forcement of the international code through the 
projected League to Enforce Peace. We are 
not interested here in programs, but in historic 
fact. The fact is that each of the nations now 
belligerent professes to be fighting because it, or 
some other member of the concourse of civilized 
nations, has been injured as respects some right 
guaranteed by the common code. But this im- 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 103 

plies that the international peace-group ought to 
have been able to make good its guarantee with- 
out any one resorting to arms, and that it has 
failed. And that implication introduces the 
query as to whether an enlarged peace-group 
can assure any international rights by peaceful 
means. 

But the international peace-group has not as 
yet taken form sufficiently to have developed 
apparatus for guaranteeing anything. Even the 
very ancient nation had a king into whose hands 
the mores were delivered for safeguarding; but 
there is no corresponding international func- 
tionary. There is no executive. There is also 
no law-making body, nor yet a judiciary whose 
authority is habitually deferred to. If we ask 
what rights the international peace-group might 
claim to secure — which is equivalent, as we 
have seen, to inquiring as to what taboos there 
are in the international code — we find that these 
latter are nowhere stated in authoritative guise, 
as in a constitution. They are not codified in 
specific form; they are not even recorded in a 
generalized form. Some authors have sought to 
assemble international cases or to generalize 
upon international usage in some particular field, 
but no recognized codification has emerged. 



104 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

The international political or governmental 
organization — the apparatus for international 
control — is where the organization of the na- 
tional peace-group was some time ago. There is, 
among civilized nations, a common public 
opinion, and that public opinion can and does 
distinguish between civilized and other conduct. 
There are also i)recedents based upon former set- 
tlements, secured bj conflict or compromise be- 
tween two or more nations. But that is all there 
is. For enforcing its behests the " judgment of 
civilization " is provided with no current and 
usual means short of violence or the threat of 
violence. 

Nations stand toward one another a good deal 
as individuals or small societies stood, before the 
advent of enforceable law; the}^ strive to realize 
their own interests with small heed to the wider 
interests of the corporate body of which they are 
coming to form a part. They make common 
cause with, or fall into disagreement with their 
fellows, according as their lasting or shifting in- 
terests harmonize or antagonize. The result is 
large-scale alignment or opposition, on the order 
of the party alliance and opposition within the 
better organized smaller peace-group. But there 
is no wav of reallv settling differences short of 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 105 

force. There is no parallel to the election, but 
at best a veiled military menace. Ententes, un- 
derstandings, treaties, balancings of power are 
the onlj' devices for preserving the peace — be- 
tween the contracting parties as well as between 
the alliance and awed outsiders — and these as- 
sociations are only as strong as their weakest 
links, their least interested members. There are 
often also secret arrangements, a fact which leads 
of course to mutual distrust and suspicion. 
They are untrustworthy and always imply a 
threat of violence. They are very far inferior 
to the arrangements for securing the rights of 
component parts, as developed in the older, 
smaller types of the peace-group. There is, in 
a word, no international organization of control. 
There is a recession from war as a means of set- 
tlement, but there is nothing definite and reliable 
to take its place. 

There is only that diplomacy which finds its ex- 
pression in the treaties and other arrangements 
alluded to. This factor, however, is not to be 
despised. I have quoted some one who said: 
" If peoples are mad enough, they will fight ; " 
and the speaker added : " If they aren't, the 
ordinary means of diplomacy will do." That is, 
diplomacy will secure peace up to a certain point. 



106 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

and on the minor issues. It may prevent a minor 
issue from becoming, through misunderstanding 
and excitement, a major one. It is full of com- 
promise and of the quid pro quo. It is like the 
settlement out of court. It helps to make prece- 
dents, and has been of solid utility in preventing 
conflict. But it represents no real control. It 
has no organization and is generally an al'fair of 
two nations rather than an international thing. 
It shows a set of variations in international mores 
rather than a settled institutional form. Its 
practice represents international politics rather 
than international statesmanship. 

But its out-reachings are promising, as the va- 
riation is always prophetic of better adaptation. 
Once there was no diplomacy to speak of, and 
what there was lay between small isolated tribes; 
now its field has expanded and it is doing for the 
larger groups what it once did for the smaller. 
There it led to closer and closer agreements and 
to alliances; and it is the basis, as we have seen, 
of the ententes and other wide rajyprochements of 
great nations. It undoubtedly prevented tribal 
wars and spread mutual knowledge and toler- 
ance ; and it has unquestionably staved off inter- 
national conflict and brought nations into alli- 
ance for a common cause. It has also improved 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 107 

in quality, until, in the most enlightened hands, 
it has ceased to be a mere art of trickery and 
double-dealing; the diplomat is supposed to 
guard the honor of his country. It is a shock to 
the civilized world when an accredited represen- 
tative of a civilized nation takes advantage of 
the hospitality accorded him to exhibit the traits 
of uncivilization. In such a case, the govern- 
ment that sent him hastens to disavow and pun- 
ish his action, at least in form, unless it w'ishes 
to recognize him, and it, as correctly representing 
his country of origin and its degree of civiliza- 
tion. However, diplomacy is not the definite 
thing that can replace violent conflict between 
nations, as political competition has displaced 
the conflict in arms within the range of a central- 
ized governmental control. International com- 
petition has not yet arrived at any settled fonn 
of combination rei)resenting an adjustment that 
renders the primitive form of militancy obsolete. 
Within the smaller peace-group, with its politi- 
cal competition, the peace is to be kept, who- 
ever wins. Nothing such appears in the larger 
group. One nation is overreached in diplomacy, 
and at once gets ready to adjourn to another 
arena where diplomacy is not. But within both 
smaller and larger groups there is a further form 



108 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

of peaceful competition, the industrial and com- 
mercial, or, to cover both terms with one, the 
economic. It is very largely in connection with 
this form of conflict that diplomacy has been 
developed. Commercial competition, in earlier 
times, was a development out of war-competition, 
and readily ran back into the violence out of 
which it came. Piracy was a sort of reverse side 
of early trade; for a long time the violent form 
persisted alongside the peaceful one, and the mer- 
chant was trader or pirate according to circum- 
stances. Trade wars were common even after 
the world-market began to develop; every rival 
nation was after a monopoly, which was succes- 
sively held by force, and lost to force, by Vene- 
tians, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutcli. Then 
came agreements of various sorts, arranged by 
diplomatic agents, and accompanied by the 
growth of the sentiment that they must be lived 
up to. 

When the international competition became 
also industrial, that is, when a market was sought 
for the products of national industries, the con- 
flict became even keener. But the competitors 
clung to peace as to an indispensable condition. 
In the economic field the trade-war was no longer 
a matter of guns. There was talk about trade 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 109 

following the flag, while the world was not as 
yet partitioned oft' into spheres of influence and 
colonies ; but latterly it was seen by most civilized 
nations that, despite tariff barriers and other 
artificial hindrances, economic success went to 
the nation that could most efficiently produce 
and most skillfully market its wares. The 
economic competition was what engaged the at- 
tention of the most advanced nations, and the 
possibility of a resort to violence seemed, for the 
most part, remote. Few realized that Germany 
could not be content with her rapid and regular 
successes in this competition, but was eagerly 
awaiting the day Avhen she might destroy the 
great rival upon whom she was pressing, in legiti- 
mate wise, so closely. There was here, in form 
at least, a close approximation to the conditions 
obtaining in a real peace-group. 

As I have said, there was no controlling and 
guaranteeing international organization. Confi- 
dence in living on safely under keen economic 
competition rested in agreements of various sorts, 
guaranteed solely by the good faith of their 
makers. It was in the mores that nations should 
keep their word and s.erve their own honor. A 
" decent respect for the opinion of mankind " 
demanded that. It was so much a matter of 



no THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

course that, when one of the leading competitors 
turned out to be treacherous^, the rest were taken 
almost completely by surprise. 

It is not to be understood that the nations were 
lookiiig out for one another's interests, in an 
altruistic way. That was not the reason for 
even that unparalleled British freedom of trade 
under which alone the economic successes of 
other nations in the world-market became pos- 
sible. No nation was ready, with self-abnega- 
tion, to fight another's battle, or in any way to 
support a competitor against its own interest. 
No nation cared to interfere witli another's 
more&, for example with polygamy, in a purely 
disinterested way. It was precisely because 
each was pursuing its own interests and securing 
agreements that furthered them that, as in the 
smaller peace-group, the inteiests of all were in 
the proper hands and came to be realized to a 
degree permitting of content under the system. 
Nations, like classes, knew tlieir own interests 
best, and in confining their attention to realizing 
them, were trying to do precisely what they were 
best fitted to do. 

The query emerged above as to whether there 
were any rights conferrable by the international 
peace-grou]), aside from the exercise of a violence, 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 111 

or the threat of such, which, in action, would 
render the group no peace-group at all. It was 
found that the " judgment of civilization " was 
provided with no traditional meaus for enforcing 
its behests short of violence or the threat of it. 
The only other means in sight has been an auto- 
matic recession from economic relations with a 
nation that might exhibit signs of economic un- 
trustworthiness. In the economic competition, 
however, civilized nations have found honesty 
and honor, or at least the counterfeit present- 
ment of such, so good a policy that there has been 
little sinning, among themselves, against it. 
The opposite qualities have been the mark of un- 
civilization that no nation \\ished to bear. To 
keep agreements has been one of the basic quali- 
fications for membership in the concourse of civ- 
ilization. The possibility of ordering existence 
within any peace-group is dependent upon the 
presence of that practice in the mores. If the 
sword is to be renounced, there must be some- 
thing dependable in its place. Until the nature 
of the German code stood revealed, the world 
thought it had something dependable in its in- 
ternational treaties and covenants. Let us con- 
sider briefly the nature of that code in the light 
of which they meant nothing. 



XI. THE GERMAN CODE 

No nation, in the pre-war period, was succeed- 
ing better in the commercial and industrial com- 
petition between the nations than was Germany. 
It was she who injected into that competition 
an organization and system before unknown. 
The hard-headed English business man of the 
past, largely unaided by his government, had 
opened wide foreign markets with unparalleled 
success. The English method of trading abroad 
has been described as " individualism gone mad." 
It is only in relatively recent years, and then 
under the stimulus of German competition, that 
the British government has lent regular and 
systematic support to the British merchant. 

The German method was systematically pater- 
nalistic. The individual German trader was, in- 
deed, practical and systematic ; and he has been 
aided at every turn by government-fostered cor- 
porations and other trade-promoting agencies, 
and also directly by the state itself. " The one 
characteristic of the trade organization of Ger- 

112 



THE GERMAN CODE 113 

many, which makes more toward efficiency than 
anything else is tlie cooperation which exists be- 
tween the government, on the one hand, and the 
business interests on the other.'' ^ 

There have been in Germany a number of 
organizations with interminable names and 
equally interminable enterprise and funds : The 
Imperial Consultative Board for the Elaboration 
of Commercial Measures, for example. The 
German consular service has advised the mer- 
chant at all times. The government has issued 
tons of literature for his instruction and profit. 
The railways have been caused to assist him, 
and the banks as well. The amount of official 
care taken in this matter is astonishing in its 
magnitude. All this is immensely costly — too 
costly for any other agency than the state — but 
it has seemed to prove itself worth the price. 

More than this, the government, meaning Bis- 
marck, a most skillful observer of the mores, was 
converted, along in the early eighties, to the 
creation of a colonial empire. It promptly seized 
three large areas and one small one in Africa ; a 
section of New Guinea and the adjacent Melane- 
sian archipelago, re-named " Bismarck-Archi- 
pel " ; a section of a province in China ; and cer- 

1 Biahop, A. L., in the Atlantic Monthly for May, 1914. 



114 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

tain small islands in the Pacific.^ The represen- 
tations of German merchants, and their plea for 
protection and for areas of trade-expansion, were 
largely responsible for this movement. This 
colonial empire was a veritable seizure from un- 
der the very paws of the British lion. The Ger- 
man Commissioner beat the British agent to 
Togo, the Cameroons, and Southwest Africa by 
hours, and the Melanesian holdings were taken in 
the face of British and Australian intentions of 
occupation. The Chinese station was exacted, 
under a ninety-nine year " lease," in consequence 
of the murder of certain German missionaries; 
and the current feeling as to the transaction 
found expression in the soliloquy attributed to 
the Kaiser by a comic paper : " If my mission- 
aries only hold out, I shall soon own the earth." 
East Africa was acquired by the efforts of three 
young adventurers who, sailing under assumed 
names and disguised as laborers, but with the 
support of the Society for German Colonization, 
bullied or cajoled a bundle of treaties, imper- 
fectly if at all understood, out of native chiefs. 
It was felt at the time that these proceedings 
partook of the cavalier nature, but the British 

1 The story of German colonization is rehearsed in some 
detail in Keller, " Colonization." 



THE GERMAN CODE 115 

statesmen were too dazed, under the calculated 
abruptness of Bismarck, to make objection. 
Such forceful methods had not been in use hith- 
erto, for the German sense of power had 
emerged but recently ; but they were passed over, 
and even somewhat admired. The important 
fact that issues from these details is that Ger- 
many went at the commercial and industrial 
competition in a highly organized and systematic 
way; and that it was, openly or covertly, the 
State that headed most of the projects and saw 
them through. The British system, or lack of 
system, had been far less of an organized and 
artificial and more of a " natural '' tjj)e. But 
this new sort of thing, while it was regarded as 
characteristic of German manners and lack of 
amenity, aroused no special opposition or even 
misgiving. 

Later on, however, certain statesmen became 
convinced that Germany was looking for trouble. 
The Kaiser's visit to the Holy Land, his proclama- 
tion of himself as protector of Islam, the incident 
of Manila Bay, the Moroccan difficulties, and 
other events of like color and betraying a cer- 
tain attitude of mind, came to be cited as indica- 
tive of a threat and a menace. The diplomats 
conceived a growing distaste for the behavior of 



116 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

German agents around the international confer- 
ence-table. All these things could not be set 
down forthwith to the account of Teutonic boor- 
ishness; there was calculation behind them, and 
a policy that included an overbearing belliger- 
ency and a frequent laying of the fist upon the 
saber-hilt. But the apprehensions of the diplo- 
mats received no support in public opinion and 
there were comparatively few who were not sur- 
prised when they turned out to have a very real 
basis. 

The unusual and offensive conduct of the Ger- 
mans in their international relations is now seen 
to have been the inevitable reflection of their 
national code. The utter disgust expressed by 
Goethe, a century ago, for the Prussian, is seen 
to have been yet another of his exhibitions of 
insight. But now, shortly after the middle of 
the last century, there occurred a precipitation 
of the German national solution under the mas- 
ter-agitation of a powerful adherent of autocracy, 
and the dominant tinge of the final combination 
w^as Prussian. It has so remained. With re- 
lentless efficiency the appropriate mores have 
been suggested, transmitted, and inculcated in an 
apt human material. The Imperial State was 
constructed on a pedestal of iron, blood-bathed, 



THE GERMAN CODE 117 

for the support of a ruler autocratic in his divine 
right. The whole complex of mores became more 
and more militaristic, the ostensible excuse for 
that retrograde tendency being the central posi- 
tion of the Fatherland, menaced on all sides by 
its " iron ring ■ ' of enemies. 

This code seemed to be succeeding well and be- 
came the prosperity-policy of the nation. Few 
cared or dared to question or criticize it. Then, 
coinciding with the natural self-assertive tend- 
ency of a newly unified people, the conviction 
as to its efficacy developed into a blind faith in 
its supreme potency, and, at length, into a de- 
gree of ethnocentrism unparalleled among intel- 
ligent races. And finally arose the dogma of its 
world-mission: to disseminate die edit deutsche 
Kultur to the benighted or decadent nations. 
Thus developed a doctrine. 

" If you want war,'' writes Sumner,^ " nourish 
a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful 
tyrants to which men ever are subject, because 
doctrines get inside of a man's own reason and 
betray him against himself. Civilized men have 
done their fiercest fighting for doctrines. The 
reconquest of the Holy Sepulcher, ' the balance 
of power,' ' no universal dominion,' ^ trade fol- 

1 " Collected Essays," I, 36, 37, 38. 



118 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

lows the flag,' ' he who holds the land will hold 
the sea/ ' the throne and the altar/ the revolu- 
tion, the faith — these are the things for which 
men liave given their lives. . . . Think what an 
abomination in statecraft an abstract doctrine 
must be. Any politician or editor can, at any 
moment, put a now extension on it. The people 
acquiesce in the doctrine and applaud it, be- 
cause they hear the politicians and editors repeat 
it, and the politicians and editors repeat it be- 
cause they think it is popular. So it grows." 

I hardly need to go into this matter further. 
He who runs may read the outcome of the Ger- 
man doctrine. It has led Germany to hate and 
envy her even partially successful peaceful rivals, 
and to risk all the substantial meat she had by 
snap])ing at the reflection in the water. She 
wanted, not her legitimate share under the rules 
of peaceful competition, but all. The only way 
to get all was to break the rules. Well, she was 
ready, in her state of mores, for even that. 

The contemporary disi)osition and code of the 
Germans have been vigorously summed up by 
Burroughs.^ He cites a number of their un- 

1 " Can Peace Make Us Forget ? " A Plea for the Ostracism 
of all Tilings German, in the Xew York Tribune for December 
14, 1917. 



THE GERMAN CODE 119 

speakable atrocities ; protests rightly against tlie 
shallow sophistication that says : " Never mind ; 
let it all pass; business is business, and it will 
all be the same in a hundred years ; '' and writes 
of German ideas as follows. I have seen no 
better condensed summaiy. 

" We do not want their ideas or their methods. 
Their ideas are subversive of our democratic 
ideals, and their methods enslave the mind and 
lead to efficiency chiefly in the field of organized 
robbery. They are efficient as Krupp guns and 
asphyxiating gas and liquid fire are efficient. 
They invent nothing, but they add a Satanic 
touch to the inventions of others and turn them 
to infernal uses. They are without sentiment or 
imagination. They have broken comj)letely with 
the old Germany of Goethe, of Kant and Lessing, 
to whom we all owe a debt. They are learned in 
the roots of things, but their learning is dusty 
and musty with underground conditions. They 
know the ' Tree of Knowledge ' at the bottom, but 
not at the top in the air and sun, where are its 
leaves and flowers and fruit. They run to erudi- 
tion, but not to inspiration. They are a heavy, 
materialistic, grasping race, forceful but not cre- 
ative, military but not humanistic, aggressive but 
not heroic, religious but not spiritual; brave it 



120 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

maj be, but not chivalrous, utterly selfish, thor- 
oughly scientific and efficient on a low plane, as 
organized force is always efficient. . . , 

" The Germans have not fought this war like 
brave, chivalrous men; they have fought it like 
sneaks and cutthroats; they have respected 
nothing human or divine. So far as they could 
make it so it has been an orgy of lust and 
destructiveness. When their armies are forced 
to retreat, so far as they can do it, they destroy 
the very earth behind them. They have done 
their utmost to make the reconquered territory 
of Northern France uninhabitable for genera- 
tions. If they could ])oison all the water, all the 
air, all the food of their enemies, is there any 
doubt that they would quicklj^ do so? If they 
could have scuttled or torpedoed the British 
Isles and sunk them like a ship, would they not 
have done it long ago? Of course they would 
have wanted to plunder the treasures and violate 
the women before doing so, and then the Kaiser, 
piously lifting his eyes before his people, would 
have again thanked God for His ' faithful coop- 
eration,' and again would have prated how he 
would continue to carry on the war with ' humil- 
ity and chivalry.' " 

An arrogant, grasping, and cruel winner; a 



THE GERMAN CODE 121 

poor loser, cherishing a malignant envy toward 
rivals — in short, a poor player of the game, 
ready to break it up to secure an advantage. 
That is what the German code has made of the 
German. No wonder that the peaceful interna- 
tional competition was broken up by him ; for it 
demands the same good sportsmanship to play 
that tremendous game aright as to engage in any 
other social undertaking involving competition. 
No wonder the German code has developed into 
a momentous challenge to the code of modern 
civilization. 



XII. THE CHALLENGE TO THE INTER- 
NATIONAL CODE 

Because mj chief interest is selection by war, 
I have felt it necessary to consider rather care- 
fully the constitution of the peace-group, and of 
those accompanying adai)tations which allow of 
the peaceful settlement of issues, that is, of peace- 
ful conflict and selection. For war-selection has 
issued in these structures for peace, and can be 
understood only as one realizes that it has been 
succeeded by them, and is now resorted to that 
they may become the more secure. Through war 
to peace. For war is a temporary thing, and 
we shall presently return to peace and its 
methods — but not before a selection has been 
wrought at the hand of war which nothing else 
but war can bring to pass, and whose completion 
must not be stayed unless it is desirable to have 
war invoked again. The issue of the present is 
too big for any methods of peaceful settlement 
ever developed by the race. 

In this age, with the mores of civilization 

122 



THE CHALLENGE 123 

always stressing toward peace, a world-conflict 
such as the present one cannot arise unless there 
is a vital issue, an issue over the essentials of 
civilization. To recur yet once again to the 
smaller peace-group : here the essentials are in 
the national code and are accepted by nearly all 
as axiomatic. But suppose these essentials are 
challenged. Then, while the minor cases of di- 
vergent interests are composed by peaceful com- 
petition, under the general code, and upon it as 
a sort of touchstone, the essentials cannot be so 
settled. For there can be no reference to a wider 
peaceful autliority over the challenging mores 
than the challenged code itself. It takes revolu- 
tion and civil war to bring about the composition 
of an issue as to the code itself. I refer again to 
the case of slavery in this counti*y. The lesser 
challenges to details of the national code have 
been settled with little and local violence; but 
when the peace-group could not continue to exist 
half one thing and half the other — without, 
that is, a clean-cut and profound selection — the 
violence has been enormous and nation-wide. 

Similarly in the case of the more comprehen- 
sive peace-group. There is now a Great War, 
enlisting nearly the whole of civilization, because 
there was a challenge to the essentials of the 



124 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

code of the civilized world. Frantic efforts to 
localize the conflict have been of no avail because 
the challenge was directed unmistakably at the 
verj' heart of the code by which the civilized peo- 
ples had been living. 

It is true that the sweeping nature of the chal- 
lenge was not clear from the outset. It came, 
in fact, unexpectedly to most of the concourse 
of nations, and the gathering revelations of its 
character remained for some time incredible. 
Only gradually did the basic issue disengage itself 
from non-essentials and stand forth stark and 
bare before the unl)elievers. There is no object 
in recording in this place the successive stages 
of growing illumination and disillusion. The 
whole conflict has resolved itself into as pure 
a conflict of codes, joined on the grandest scale, 
as any the world ever saw on the smaller scale; 
and the selection is bound to be, now or later, as 
decisive on the grandest scale as any ever wit- 
nessed on the smaller. The civilized world can- 
not continue to exist half one thing and half the 
other. Unless we are to turn back on the course 
of societal evolution, which is uuthiukable in the 
absence of a summoning change in life-condi- 
tions, this challenge will be repelled and anni- 
hilated. It will certainly be so repelled, now 



THE CHALLENGE 125 

or later, by the unhurried action of the elemental 
forces that are behind all societal evolution ; but 
we can save part of the cost of the process, paid 
in human suffering, by understanding and work- 
ing with those forces. 

Let us look into the nature of the challenge, as 
at length revealed in the event. Perhaps the 
central article of all, and the one upon which the 
President has unerringly fastened, is the flouting 
of international engagements and covenants. 
This strikes at the only formulation of the inter- 
national code ever attained, and at the only 
guaranteeing power behind agreements, which is 
national honor. No civilized nation has openly 
and deliberately assaulted those fundamentals 
before, and with a counter-system in mind. Evi- 
dently, however, the German intention is to dis- 
place them in favor of something else, namely, 
national necessity backed by highly organized 
force. But this, of course, would reduce the in- 
ternational peace-group to the violent chaos of 
aforetime, out of which it has slowly and pain- 
fully emerged at the cost of endless human woe. 
It is a negation of the very beginnings of law, 
and is equivalent to the theory that any indi- 
vidual may take the law into his own hands if 
he needs to and is strong enough to defy its 



126 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

sponsors. One or the other of these tlieories 
must prevail ; they cannot go on side by side. 

Implicit in this item of challenge is the inten- 
tion of bending all other interests to German 
interests, and by violence or the threat of such. 
Consider the " will-to-power " of a self-styled 
supreme nation. But this idea is utterly incon- 
sonant with the international code, in so far as 
it has developed. That code contemplates an 
equality of nations in their dealings with one an- 
other. Its contention is on the order of " Live 
and Let Live.'' To the Germans the small and 
weak nations — weak because small — have no 
reason for or right to independent existence. 
The international code, voiced again by the Presi- 
dent, holds the opposite view. Here again is a 
contrast admitting of no compromise. It is no 
less a question than of how the world is to be 
run; and there is no doubt, now that the issue 
has been bared, about the world's opinion on 
that score. 

Challenge is thrown down, further, to the spirit 
of amity between nations upon a friendly footing; 
it is proposed, evidently, to return to suspicion, 
treachery, and h3'pocrisy; to cast aside tlie an- 
cient mores of guestfriendsliip and to betray and 
use hospitality for all it is wortli to the guest. 



THE CHALLENGE 127 

No longer are we to trust the honor of a nation 
as signalized in the honorable conduct of its 
official representatives. This proposition strikes 
at the only settled method of composing peace- 
ably the divergent interests of nations. If every 
ambassador were a Luxburg, or a Dumba, of 
what possible utility for a peace-group could the 
whole system of representation of foreign in- 
terests be? Accredited representatives must all 
be honest and of goodwill, or they must all 
be regarded as enemies within our lines. The 
German and Austrian ambassador have been 
spies upon friends, relying ui)on virtues and 
kindliness in others in order to do them treach- 
erous damage with impunity. There is no possi- 
bility of compromise with this new theory of 
diplomatic relations. Duplicity or honesty — 
not half one thing and half the other. 

The challenge is, as we see, one involving the 
whole theory of the international peace-group. 
Germany will none of it. x\ whole treatise could 
be written around this contention. The issue at 
its broadest is whether civilization is to go on 
developing the international })eaoe-group or to 
go over to the substitute set of variations fathered 
by Germany, and now thrust forward with power. 
There has to be a selection here ; and there never 



128 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

was any power short of the most strenuous 
selective factor ever developed, namely war, that 
has any remote chance of effecting the selection. 
Not a few minor items, but all the major essen- 
tials of the international code are involved in the 
challenge. No more clear-cut issue was ever pre- 
sented to human society for selection. 

But let us go on with other items of challenge 
to the code of civilization, not involving, perhaps, 
so direct an assault upon the existence of the 
peace-group, but seeking to abrogate the very 
mores of humanity and human pity which naked 
savages were already in primitive times respect- 
ing. For long ages, as I have shown, the 
methods of warfare have been rendered less harsh 
and bestial by the si>ontaneous development of 
chivalry and humanity. There are always in 
war certain loosenings of the cod<^s of individ- 
uals ; the baser sort are freed from restraints, in 
their relations with members of the " out-group," 
which they have perforce observed in those with 
fellow group-members. But even between na- 
tions at war certain taboos have been honored, 
at least in form and officially, which prohibited 
the most ruthless conduct. These the Germans 
have challenged, both informally and officially, 
cynically remarking that '" Kricg ist Krieg/' 



THE CHALLENGE 129 

The world is too sophisticated to be impressed 
with war-paint and scalps, but it was thought 
that it could be cowed by a more elaborate, sys- 
tematic, and inhuman SchrecklichJceit. 

It is a libel on the Hun to use his face and 
figure to symbolize the Geiman. For a long time 
no right-minded man could believe that such 
things could be, or ever had been; but he can 
doubt no longer. This is no gentleman's war; 
it is not a war against ci\ilized people, for the 
code is the mark of civilization and the German 
code is beneath that of the Sioux in their blood- 
iest days. Is it needful to go into detail? Let 
the reader examine the reports of the Bryce and 
other commissions and reflect upon that evidence. 
It is an injustice to the most primitive man to 
call such calculated conduct barbarous or sav- 
age. It wants a parallel on earth. All this 
is part of the official program of frightfulness ; 
but the ultimate purpose is a jiopular one, or 
there would be protest, disobedience, or revolt. 
Fancy official orders to misuse women given to 
American soldiers; to an army whose penalty 
for rape is death. Yet the German soldiers 
have carried out the orders with gusto; they 
did not rebuke, nor were they rebuked. It is 
from the German nation, not from a few of its 



130 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

rulers, that this challenge to humanity derives; 
and the nation thus betrays itself as essentially 
uncivilized. Its assault upon civilization must 
be repelled as former assaults have been, if the 
code that includes what we most prize is to live 
on. The world cannot go on half-humane and 
half Vandal, i^^chrccklichkeit and humanity do 
not mix. The latter awaits its deliverance — its 
Tours and its Martel. 

It is, in a sense, immaterial where this Ger- 
man variation on the world-code came from, ex- 
cept that it is not to be referred to individual, 
purposeful action. The situation, finally re- 
vealed, is the challenge of the loathsome thing, 
and the fact that the challenge has been at length 
realized and taken up by civilization. The pro- 
cess of selection is on, in its strongest and final 
form. There is no further appeal for us if war 
does not bring a decision. The issue is the grav- 
est that has ever confronted human society, and 
the selective agency is present in a power never 
before imagined. We face, indeed, a critical 
episode in societal evolution. And the appre- 
hension of the issues involved has led to an align- 
ment of world-opinion on a scale unparalleled in 
history. 



XIII. THE FORMATION OF A WORLD- 
OPINION 

The ^riking reversal of the world's opinion 
about Germany is one of the outstanding phe- 
nomena of the time. Nearly a score of nations 
have declared war on her, and a number of others 
have broken off relations. Openly on her side 
stand her three vassals — how willingly we can- 
not surely say. No other nation lias ever seen 
the public opinion of the world so massed against 
it. 

A thing of this sort does not happen without 
reason. But the significant fact about this 
mobilization of public opinion is the spontaneity 
of its response. The planning and the propa- 
ganda, along with the rest of the preparedness, 
were aimed in another direction. The masses of 
civilized nations did not figure out the broad 
issue, and have not yet done so; but they re- 
sented the exhibitions of malevolence and feared 
for their own interests. They went through no 
" Pentecost of Calamity," but they came to know 
what was being done in the way of murder, rob- 

131 



132 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

bery, violation, and desecration, and it shocked 
them. They knew, at length, what women and 
children had to expect from the German, and the 
moral gorge rose within them. To man}' came 
an accession of cold and relentless rage as they 
saw in the mind's eye their own wives and daugh- 
ters at the mercy of the apostles of Kultur, and 
their young children mangled or turned out to 
wander alone and helpless through a ruined land. 
With a " larger selfishuess " they rallied to the 
defense of the code of humanity. 

It took overt acts — conditions and not the- 
ories — to bring them to this ; and even then 
there was an interval, in the remoter c6untries, 
before incredulity gave way. It is siguiticant 
of much that German public opinion needed no 
such interval of accommodation ; it was not in a 
condition to be shocked or temporarily ])aralyzed 
by surprise. But the. masses in other nations 
were not prepared. They could not have known 
of the great Goethe's scathing comments on the 
Prussian. They could not sense the irritation of 
John Hay at Prussian " jackboo.tism." They 
knew nothing of German, atrocities in the col- 
onies, in apology for which even German official- 
dom adopted the term TropenkoUer^ or madness 
of the tropics. They were not in the way of 



FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 133 

hearing of Treitschke or Der Tag. They re- 
garded the saber-rattling as an amusing piece 
of boorishness, and the " shining armor " as the 
theatrical posturing of an imperial gallery- 
player. They goodnatu redly accepted the ex- 
planation that '' war-lord '' was a mistranslation 
of a perfectly innocuous term, and they even ap- 
plauded, a few years ago, the Kaiser's pious re- 
minder, on the occasion of his quarter-centenary 
as ruler, that peace, not war, had been near his 
heart. True; there had been no war. There is 
always peace till there is not. They smiled at 
the old man's dreams — Lord Roberts, " good old 
Bobs," who, in his eagerness lest the common 
weal take harm, saw specters in broad daylight 
— and at the young man's visions. 

But the overt acts came, and there was no 
denying them; and there was found no appeal 
against them save to the s-word. Others were 
tried faithfully enough, and patience was 
stretched to the breaking-point. Time was lost, 
it may be, by our own long effort to restore the 
peace-group by peaceful means ; but the ultimate 
failure of that effort was more convincing to us 
and to the world than anything else could have 
been. It settled the fact that the essence of the 
international code had been deliberately chal- 



134. THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

lenged, and that war was the only possible ar- 
bitrament, for it was the only argument that the 
challenger could understand. Time was lost, 
it may be, but realization was sharpened. If our 
protracted patience, and our repeated and reiter- 
ated reference to the essentials of the code, to 
honor and humanity, had not availed, certainly 
no other and weaker nation could hope to convert 
and persuade by its representations. Irrespec- 
tive of his personal courage or faintheartedness, 
temporizing or farsightedness, the President, in 
his repeated notes, not only revealed that Ger- 
many was challenging the essentials of civiliza- 
tion, but also formulated, as it had not before 
been formulated, the code that was in jieril. It 
stood forth, in his hands, as something eminently 
desirable and indispensable. The vague con- 
ceptions of simpler minds were crystallized into 
delinite form, for the exjiosition of the essentials 
of international behavior was done with the same 
sort of simple clarity that Lincoln was master of. 
And it was not alone the simpler minds that were 
clarified — was it not Lincoln, again, who said 
that if a proposition is stated clearly enough 
for the simple to understand, the wise have no 
excuse for not understanding? In any case, the 
sentiment arose that, while there was an ap- 



FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 135 

proved way for human beings and nations to live 
and act, Germany would have none of it, and 
meant to replace the traditional code by another 
of which she was making a repulsive exhibition. 
The alternative was to renounce the old code or 
fight ; and the decision of civilization was for the 
latter. Even the Allies, already in the field, 
saw better now what they were fighting for, and 
took heart when they knew that the rest of 
civilization was with them. 

Evidently the former international peace- 
group has broken down. There are now two 
peace-groups, of two different varieties, fighting 
one anotlier. The initial advantage was all on 
the challenging side, for, in addition to its status 
of readiness, its organization was better fitted for 
the exercise of violence. Apart from the pity of 
it, there was a question about the ability of 
essentially peaceful, industrial societies to go 
back and succeed in violent conflict, to which they 
had become disaccustomed, against an enemy that 
was never out of practice. It was and has re- 
mained a question whether a group of free and 
independent democracies could attain to the in- 
tegration of a group whose whole control lay in 
a single dominant body. It was a question of 
becoming ju-oficient, against the will, in a cruder 



136 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

form of conflict than the one to whose condi- 
tions adjustment had been made. The antagonist 
had selected his own weapons, method of com- 
bat, and time; he had to be faced on his own 
selected ground. It has been a grand test of 
adaptability for the industrial nations. 

But the spirit of civilization has risen to meet 
the crisis. Here is something, however re- 
pugnant, that has to be done. Fire has to be 
fought with fire. It will be done, and done to 
the Queen's taste. It will be seen through to the 
end. Only — " Never Again I " This seems to 
be the mood of the defenders of civilization. It 
is in contrast with that of the assaulters who al- 
ready look forward to the " next war " ; for, in 
their code, war is, in and of itself, a good thing. 
So far are they removed from the consensus of 
civilization. But the contemptible decadent who 
did not worship " Gott '' — unsrrn alten Gott — 
has, despite desperate initial handicaps, frus- 
trated the deep-laid designs of Wcltmacht, and 
has shown that, when it is inevitable, he can play 
the game he does not wish to play. Swift adapt- 
ation to the militancy that they did not love has 
characterized the industrial nations; radical 
transformations of policy, as when America had 
recourse to the draft, have revealed an alertness 



FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 137 

in adaptation that no one suspected. Such rad- 
ical means of adjustment could never have been 
put into operation among a free people if that 
people — the common people, the masses — had 
not sensed the peril to civilization and the pros- 
pect of losing that which had made life on earth, 
especiall}^ life in America, worth living. Once 
sensed, the movement to repel the peril was as 
spontaneous as the rushing together of isolated 
frontiersmen to meet the menace of an Indian 
raid. 

I have said that it took overt acts to rouse the 
world's public opinion. It is not yet fully roused 
because by many these acts are not yet visualized. 
There are i)eople who are deficient in imagination 
— in the power of visualization. They take in 
only dully and vaguely that which does not enter 
their minds by way of direct impression upon the 
senses. This is particularly true if their minds 
have been adjusted to altogether different sorts 
of things. Many an Englishman saw the light 
when he had viewed an air-raid, and had perhaps 
witnessed the mutilation of children and the 
despair of motliers. Friglitfulness did not intim- 
idate him, but roused and infuriated him, when 
once he had met it face to face. Pacifists in this 
country would not hold out long in their fatuity 



138 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

if they were obliged, fast-bound, to witness the 
orgies of the German officer and soldier, par- 
ticularly if the victims were of their own house- 
hold. The man with imagination visualizes these 
horrors that shame the sun with tightening 
throat and implacable anger, and also with 
alarm. For there is nothing more inviolable in 
American young womanhood, nor more appealing 
in American babies, than there was in French 
and Belgian and Polish girlhood and childhood. 
To the unimaginative in this country has come, 
however, a series of shocks : the submarine war- 
fare, the malevolence and duplicity of diplo- 
matic agents, the revelations of the Zimmermann 
note, the unbelievable disclosures of the spy 
system, the uncovering of malignant plotting of 
every sort. Some of these things have struck 
very near home — near enough to be visualized. 
The government has doled out authenticated 
items, from time to time, wliich seem to be but 
part of a larger store. Our peo]de do not like 
war; they hate it. But all but the traitors and 
the incurably light-minded want it now — want 
" this one more war to kill war," as some one has 
well put it. And the more they shall suffer from 
war, and fear and hate it, the keener will they be 
to win this one. The opponents of war, like the 



FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 139 

one-time hyphenated Americans, are not so nu- 
merous as they are noisy. We, like the English 
and French, are buckling dowTi soberl}- as a 
nation to the Augean task of cleaning out the 
stables of central Europe, hoping to lay hand, 
at length, upon a Circe's rod that will turn the 
Saunvensch into a human again. 

This is not militarism. It is militancy. We 
have been obliged to descend to the adversary's 
level, so far as to take up the gage from the 
ground upon which it was tlung; but war is no 
creed or " -ism " to the civilized nations now fac- 
ing Germany and her henchmen. Civilized 
public opinion can never tolerate remaining on 
the German level except to fight the extension of 
the German code ; and that is why " Never 
Again " means a definite decision now. If there 
is no decision, then we may all have to stay upon 
that lower level so long, and to remain militant 
in such an increasing and desperate degree, that 
we may unlearn our anti-militarism. There is 
danger in an approach to militarism ; for it has a 
glamor, is seductive, and is attended by what 
Franklin called the " pest of gloiy." It is es- 
sential to the selection that the present war is 
effecting that we liold tiglit to the code of civili- 
zation while we are utterly destroying the rank 



140 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

growth that threatens it. It is this latter that 
must be " sunk without a trace,'' and quickly, too, 
I repeat; for if the war lasts on for years, 
speedily recurs, or, because no definitive decision 
is reached, threatens and demands a huge defen- 
sive organization, we shall run much risk of em- 
bracing the evil against which we are now em- 
battled. 

This gathering public opinion of the world is 
going to make itself felt, not alone in war, but 
also, in ways peculiar to itself, when the wai* is 
over. To it German}- is already outside the pale 
of civilization ; and this war means, therefore, in 
a ver3^ real sense, no break-up at all, but a cause 
of strengthening and cohesion, for the interna- 
tional peace-group. Turkey's jiast performances 
have never been taken to indicate anything con- 
cerning the status of the international code ; she 
simply did not count in respect to that. And 
Germany ranks with Turkey, though infinitely 
more treacherous and dangerous. Tliese birds of 
a feather are now snuggling harmoniously to- 
gether on the same roost. Germany's case is that 
of a renegade movement against civilization by a 
professed member and supporter of the interna- 
tional i)eace-group, who has secretly come to 
sneer at its code and has obseiwed its forms in 



FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 141 

order the more securely to assault it. Expulsion 
from the group is the natural result. What that 
will mean during and after the war we can better 
judge, perhaps, when we have considered more 
generally the function, in societal evolution, of 
conflict by violence. 



XIV. SELECTION BY WAR 

The consideratiou ol' societal selectiou other 
tbau by war, though it has been treated not so 
much for itself as for its bearing upon war-selec- 
tion, has engaged us for some time; it has been 
protracted because of the number of aspects 
which it presents, and because much light is 
thrown upon \\'ar-selection by reflecting some- 
what carefully and fully over the other and 
milder forms that have superseded it to such a 
wide extent. Peaceful selection is indeed the en- 
lightened and evolved form upon which civiliza- 
tion has prided itself, and for which no excuses 
or disavowals ever need to be made. But now 
we have seen that it is too line an instrument for 
the settlement of the major and essential issues, 
when the latter involve a challenge to the death. 
This sort of crisis calls for the primordial and 
elemental blood and iron. We come, then, to an 
examination of the methods and results of selec- 
tion in the mores as effected by war. 

It has been noted that a " conflict of the 
mores " is a figure of speech ; the conflict is be- 

142 



SELECTION BY WAR 143 

tween the adherents or exponents of the mores. 
If the adherents of one code are annihilated, 
selection has done its work in favor of the rival 
code. The simplest and most conclusive form 
of war-selection is therefore by annihilation. It 
was the primordial form, where there was no such 
thing as quarter. The Germans have practiced 
it in no small degree, and deliberately, not alone 
on the battle-field, but also in the prison-camp 
and the slave-quarters. To the conventional 
methods and instruments of destruction in battle 
have been added gas and fire attacks and the dis- 
semination of poison and disease. Once it was a 
thing to shudder at when one read of colonists 
leaving smallpox-infected garments where the 
Indians might find and use them; it was in- 
credibly inhuman and barbarous; but now we are 
used to worse tilings and have even had to de- 
scend to them in self-defense. The airship and 
submarine, in (icrman hands, represented cruel 
and unusual instrumentalities, not recognized by 
the Allies as allowable in civilized warfare. And 
as for the prisoners and non-combatants, the con- 
dition of the captured Germans should be com- 
pared with that of captives made by the Germans, 
or with tliat of the enslaved Belgians who have 
been returned to their homes, at length, wrecked 



144 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

physically for life. It is clear enough that the 
Germans are not content with the toll of annihil- 
ation taken on the battlefield ; they have in mind 
no less than annihilation of any and all, and 
especially of the smaller nations, who may stand 
in their way. Belgium and Serbia have been 
systematically annihilated, in so far as was pos- 
sible. 

It is characteristic of the Teutonic half-knowl- 
edge that sucli procedure is justified by reference 
to the Darwinian theory. This would seem, at 
first sight, to be a mere subterfuge ; but there is a 
ponderous and muddled sincerity here. Ger- 
mans have always been strong in applying theory 
from one field to matters of a quite different 
quality in another range; it took Germans to 
work out in meticulous detail the analogy be- 
tween a society and an organism, and finally 
come to identify the two. There is no need of 
writing a book, as Nasmyth ' lias done, to prove 
that Darwin countenanced no such conclusions 
as have been drawn in his name ; even an elemen- 
tary analysis reveals the fact that organic and 
societal evolution are effective each on its own 
plane, and according to its own mode, and not 
otherwise. But a swift snatch at the analogy 

1 " Social Progress and the Darwinian Theory." 



SELECTION BY WAR 145 

was satisfactory to the German mind, especially 
since the crude conclusions were in consonance 
with German mores. 

It remains true, however, that the most ef- 
fective societal selection is secured through anni- 
hilation of one of the contending codes by the re- 
moval of the persons of its adherents. Doubt- 
less most of the earliest and most determinative 
selections in the course of societal evolution came 
about in this manner. They are the ones that 
have lasted and have laid down the lines for the 
subsequent development of society. But, while 
war has always implied i)artial annihilation, it 
came, after a while, to l)e restricted to that. 
When enough antagonists had been killed to 
weaken the enemy's power of resistance, the rest 
were enslaved. Our interest in such enslavement 
lies only in the bearing upon selection of this 
alternative to annihilation. In the subjection 
here referred to, there is no idea of deliberately 
producing tuberculous human wrecks, that is, of 
enslaving with the purpose of annihilation at 
leisure; the reference is to subjection by con- 
quest, after which masters and slaves live side by 
side in the same society. In such a case there 
ensues a selection in the mores, but by no means 
the prevalence of one code, even that of the 



146 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

masters, in its original lines. Rather is there 
mutual transmission of mores and a composite 
product. The result is a compounding of the 
two classes and of their interests, and, at length, 
a merging of their identity. This is the way 
states have formed. If, however, the masters 
exert unremitting pressure to extend their own 
code over the conquered, and will none of the 
other, the two social strata remain in open or 
latent hostility, as in Alsace, and refuse to 
amalgamate, even under a combination of 
strenuous compulsion and occasional feigned 
complaisance. 

There can be no doubt that, if Germany were 
to win, there would be a farther and wider ex- 
hibition of what has occurred in her conquered 
provinces and in her so-called colonies. And that 
would mean that, sooner or later, there would be 
another conflict. Every one knows that Ger- 
many despaired of Germanizing Alsace-Lorraine 
except by executing or banishing the former in- 
habitants and filling their places with Germans 
— that is, by annihilation ; and in their tropical 
colonies the same insistence upon a code delivered 
to the chosen race has resulted in almost un- 
intermittent oppression of the natives and in 
recurrent revolts that have ushered in the better 



SELECTION BY WAR 147 

understood and better beloved method of selec- 
tion by direct annihilation. 

But we need not analyze closely either selec- 
tion by annihilation or selection by subjugation 
and enslavement. We do not intend to use 
either of them, when our arms shall have pre- 
vailed. They are obvious enough, and if Ger- 
many wins we shall have an opportunity of ex- 
periencing them in our own persons. They be- 
long to the German mores, and are corollaries of 
the German code where they are not its major 
articles. When we are told that the Kaiser will 
stand no nonsense from America after the war, 
that is a threat of precisely the same mailed fist 
which has banged the council-tables of several 
decades, and has more recently smitten the 
crushed and helpless victim. 

However, I feel under no constraint to believe 
or fear that the present war is about to issue in 
the survival of the German code, and so 1 shall 
confine myself to considering how the conflict 
is going to eliminate that code. There is no 
prophecy here; the massed public opinion of the 
world is a guarantee that the challenge to the 
code of civilization will not, in the end, prevail. 
There is no such change in the conditons of the 
race's life as to call for a retrogression. There is 



148 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

uo possibility that societal evolution will turu 
back upon its course and land us again in ante- 
savagery. If the Germans prevail and we are 
thus reduced, it will be time enough then to ex- 
plain how it was done. This present war-selec- 
tion is here contemplated from the standpoint of 
civilization and its interests, with the hope of 
better understanding the massive process so that 
it may not be hindered but allowed to go on to 
its full fruition. Toward furthering this end we 
do not expect to employ either annihilation or 
subjugation of the German type, and so these 
processes and their results need not be further 
considered. 

The Allied nations could have used these 
methods. In theory, that is, they could have 
done so. In practice they could not. This dis- 
ability, due to adherence to the civilized code, left 
them at a considerable material disadvantage. 
Not only could they not wantonly kill, murder, or 
enslave, but they also felt obliged to assist those 
who had l)een conquered and cold-bloodedly 
robbed by the adversary, and whom otherwise he 
would have enslaved or annihilated, or both. 
The Allies were even constrained by their code of 
humanity to help the enemy, or to buy him off 
from wholesale annihilation, by supplying Bel- 



SELECTION BY WAR 149 

gians, Poles, Armenians, and other conquered 
peoples with the means for living. It has been a 
heavy task to fight with honorable scruple against 
an unscrupulous and dishonorable foe. For 
more than three years American eai-s could 
hardly fail to hear the derisive mirth of the 
Teuton as he reached out his hand to profit by the, 
to him, simple-minded and ridiculous humanity 
of America. What would he have done? Why, 
the logical thing, of course. Fancy the German, 
if the case were reversed, assisting the enemy by 
feeding and clothing the population of a ravaged 
district. In our place he would have withheld all 
help from the Belgians and Armenians; then the 
enemy could either have spent his resources in 
maintaining them, or have incurred the abhor- 
rence of the world by letting them perish. A per- 
fectly clear case of Realpolitik. But self-re- 
spect demanded of the chami)ions of civilization 
that, except wliere response in kind was clearly 
indicated as the sole measure of self-presei-vation, 
there should be no recourse to unsavory methods. 
Reprisals for air-raids have been delayed, even 
if they are to come at all ; reprisals on German 
prisoners for the miseries and broken bodies and 
spirits of French and English captives have not 
taken place. Doubtless, as to the savage, so to 



150 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

the German, such scruples seem merely the evi- 
dence of weakness and even cowardice — in any 
case of decadence. Good old Gott could not 
countenance such soft procedure and must give 
the victory to his own true and hardy worshipers. 
It constitutes a real handicap, in such a conflict, 
to cherish such scruples. 

In general, then, the Allies are fighting in ac- 
cord with their civilized code; if there is a con- 
quest by them, there will be no annihilation or 
enslavement of the conquered. It is not that 
the adversary is not bad enough, but that " we 
are too good." Indeed, the cause foi* concern is 
quite other, namely, that there will be a mistaken 
magnanimity, a tendency to let bygones be by- 
gones and start again, a willingness to regard the 
criminal as repentant and reformed, if he says he 
is — and then turn him loose on the world again. 
This, as we shall see, will mean another war just 
as soon as Gemiany has recovered ; nothing could 
stop that except remaining armed to the teeth, 
and squandering the fruits of industry upon un- 
productive devices for destruction. Unless Ger- 
many were to renounce her code. Of course that is 
the essential — that that code shall be renounced. 
But how can that come about if there is to be no 
annihilation or subjection with control? 



SELECTION BY WAR 151 

From the beginning there has been but one ef- 
fective agency that has led men to change their 
ways: discomfort amounting to sufifering and 
productive of disillusionment. If an indi\idual 
is miserable enough, he will overhaul his mode of 
life; if a society suffers sufficiently, it will at 
length question its code. The more successful 
the code has been, or has seemed to be, in the past 
— the more inveterate the belief in it — the 
slower will the awakening be. The case before 
us is, then, a hard one; for the German people 
have had their code so exalted before them, both 
blatantly and subtly, from babyhood up, that they 
are as yet incapable, even under great i)rovoca- 
tiou, of criticizing it. They are apparently in- 
curably docile, and unwilling to form or in- 
capable of forming an independent public 
opinion. This means that there is no use try- 
ing to reason with them — not yet. It means 
that they must suffer much before they will ques- 
tion, still less give up, their ways. 

It is, then, the line of action for the Allies to 
make them suffer much, and resolutely to turn a 
deaf ear to their rulers' calculating proposals to 
end the conflict, until there shall have appeared 
unmistakable fruits meet for repentance. Pro- 
tests are of no -further avail, while the code is 



152 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

held; after it is renounced, it can be reasoned 
about — not before. The fate of naivete in this 
matter is being illustrated for us all by the Bol- 
sheviki. Tliere can be no compromise or recon- 
ciliation between the German code and the code 
we are engaged in defending, as I have sufficiently 
demonstrated above. The security of an inter- 
national peace-group is out of the question until 
this challenge to the international code has been 
eliminated. 

There is, I have said, no intention of annihilat- 
ing or enslaving the Gernuin nation. To try to 
do that would be to lend adherence to that course 
of conduct which has ostracized Germany from 
the concourse of civilized peoples. Mere military 
victory, by itself, can no more than quell the 
present assault upon the code of civilization. 
Unless that victory conies about — let us be clear 
on that — nothing else can be done; but if it is 
not followed up by alterations and adjustments 
of the German code by the German people, no 
profound and definitive selection will have taken 
place. Adjustment along the lines of the inter- 
national code, to be effective and lasting, must 
come from within. How, then, may war result 
in this inner alteration of the mores? 



XV. GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 

Any nation's code is its prosperity-policy, and 
is clung to because of the conviction that it is an 
expedient and a winning policy in living. The 
Germans think that their militarism or Prussian- 
ism is a winning policy. They have seen some 
of the advantages whicli they have gained by 
it; and they have been adjured, since they were 
able to understand anything, to remember that 
their undoubted prosperity was due to the mili- 
tarist regime of the Hohenzollerns. That is 
doubtless the conviction of most Germans. 
^^ Das kanonenfeste Deutschland" has long been 
paraded before a sentimental and suggestible 
people, not too well endowed with a sense of the 
ridiculous. The " shining armor " and other 
stage-properties dazzle their eyes. There dangles 
before their minds a conception of the State as a 
sort of divine entity, invincible, and personified ir 
the ruling dynasty, by whose benevolent, 
paternal, unerring, and resolute action they have 
been made the greatest of nations and the world's 
hope. This has become an obsession with them 

153 



154 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

and is correlative with the contempt, clumsily 
veiled or grossly exposed, which they feel for 
other nations. It renders possible the incredibly 
fatuous expressions of their public men, authors, 
and preachers. I do not need to cite illustra- 
tions of this colossal national self-satisfaction; 
Archer ^ and others have compiled typical speci- 
mens. 

The authorities, themselves at least partially 
auto-hypnotized by this same grandiose vision, 
have worked on fertile soil. It goes without the 
saying that they could not have raised the crop 
they have upon other ground, say in France or 
England. The situation, that is, is not refer- 
able to a single individual or group of individ- 
uals, but to the automatic development of a 
typical national character and code. The sophis- 
ticated leaders, above all Bismarck, repeatedly 
took advantage, sometimes with a candid cyni- 
cism, of the ground prejiared for them. The Ger- 
man people are fetish-worshipers, and their 
fetishes are the government and especially the 
army. The creed that forms the rallying-point 
for all their adulations is militarism. Their god, 
where he is not Odin or Thor of the Hammer, 
is at best the Yahweh that incited the peo^des 

1 " Gems of German Thought." 



GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 155 

of old to smite rival nations hip and thigh, with- 
out mercy. Though Germany has been nomi- 
nally Christian, not much has been heard of the 
New Dispensation. 

This militarist religion is the sanction of mili- 
tarist mores and supports them at every turn. 
It too has been tested up and found, in the Ger- 
man view, expedient and good. Only a powerful 
divinity could have presided over the demon- 
strated prosperity of the Empire. Witness the 
seizure of a million square miles of colonies, with 
a population of ten millions, accomplished with- 
in a year and from under the very nose of as- 
tonished England. Witness the German inroads 
upon the world-market, engineered by astute state 
paternalism. Witness the flocking of the nations 
to Germany in quest of knowledge and science at 
their source. It was without a sense of incon- 
sistency that all German literature, art, and 
music were referred to the same great fetish: 
Goethe and Beethoven, they too were children 
of the war-god and exponents of the absurd " will- 
to-power '' — discrepancies of an historical and 
biographical nature being irrelevant and negli- 
gible in the face of so blinding a revelation of na- 
tional superhuman superiority. Why should a 
nation not believe utterly in a code, or a pros- 



156 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

perity-policy, that could produce all this and 
more? There were plenty of local magi who 
could prove indisputably what every one wanted 
to believe. Nowhere else has the truth of the say- 
ing that the raison d'etre of the human mind con- 
sists in the fact that it can always find good and 
sufficient reason for doing what its possessor 
wants to do, received more triumphant vindica- 
tion than in Germany. 

No wonder the German felt aggrieved, con- 
temptuous, and at length enraged, because he was 
not understood by other nations. With a sad but 
divine compassion Eucken writes: 'M>ur Ger- 
man Kultur has, in its unique depth, something 
shrinking and severe; it does not obtrude itself, 
or readily yield itself up; it must be earnestly 
sought after and lovingly assimilated from with- 
in. This love was lacking in our neighbors; 
wherefore they easily came to look upon us with 
the eyes of hatred." You must first accept the 
German code blindly and then you come, as one 
of the faithful, to comprehend its serene beauty. 
So might a paranoiac remark to a sane man who 
could not share his illusions, but was somewhat 
uneasy as to the matter of personal safety in their 
presence. This is precisely the way fanatics al- 
ways talk about their religions : " Believe first ; 



GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 157 

don't think, weigh, and reflect. This revelation 
may seem to be contrary to knowledge and sense ; 
it is really not contrary to these, but above them." 
This is the time-honored " doctrine of mystery." 

Now this simple and childlike faith is what 
sanctions any and all departments of the German 
mores. By it the national code is transformed 
into a revelation. The mores, by themselves, can 
make anything right or wrong; and a super- 
natural sanction can add to these attributes so 
as to make anything also sacred or sacrilegious. 
Thus a holy joy may attend upon the sinking of 
a Lusitania; and a fanatical Hassgcsang and a 
Oott straje! may be launched at a nation whose 
action, however motived, crosses the German will 
in the form of an impiety sure to be divinely 
punished. It is all very ridiculous and even im- 
becile in its preposterous solemnity; no wonder 
Tommy causes Fritz to intone the TTymn of Hate, 
and joins uproariously in the chorus. Such a 
show has never been dreamt of before and will not 
come soon again. It confirms all the impres- 
sions derived from Punch and elsewhere, which 
the Germans have so deeply resented, as to Teu- 
tonic outlandishness. 

But now it is characteristic of a godlet like him 
of the Germans that he invariably " makes good." 



158 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

He has to, for there is, iu his portentous solem- 
nity, no room for weakness or fallings-short. 
We gentile and un-chosen peoples can make al- 
lowances for our pet fetishes, such as the 
" people,'' and even joke at them a little, for we 
do not take them with such owl-like seriousness. 
Lese-majeste has never bothered us very much. 
We have no divinely anointed One who is vul- 
nerable and even sensitive to criticism, and who 
issues pronunciamentos, out of questionable in- 
spiration, on religion, art, uiusic, and all the rest. 
Also we have no statesmen, or even theologians, 
who will meekly recant in the face of a revela- 
tion vouchsafed by the mouth of authority. We 
have here no super-men, officially in the confi- 
dence of the Deity. One of us is just as likely to 
get a revelation as another. We could laugh ap- 
preciatively at an '' Ich un4 Gott ■' poem, even if 
it were written in derision of our pet statesman. 
No, we are not reverent in the Teutonic way. 
It is no wonder that our comprehension of Kultur 
leaves much to be desired. 

But, as I said, the German fetish must make 
good. He always does, even if it takes a special 
revelation to interpret some of his doings as suc- 
cess. He inspires to sweeping victories, after 
securing treason in the enemy's War Office, not 



GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 159 

reporting that the adversaries had only crow-bars 
to fight with. And then he breathes into the 
mind of the generalissimo the master-conception 
of a victorious retreat. He is a curious conduct- 
ing medium for information from the outside 
world ; for out there too the will-to-power is never 
balked. England is already stai-ved out; the 
American soldiers cannot get across the ocean; 
they will not fight if they do ; presently the Sioux 
Indians will take New York — what is Mr. 
Dooley doing with his opportunities these days? 
If one marvels that trustful and devout people 
can be so taken in, let him reflect upon the skill 
with which the rest of the world, and even of the 
suspicious and hostile world, has been over- 
reached. The German system has made pretty 
good, so far as actual accomplishment goes, even 
in the eyes of those who would like to discredit 
it; this is ruefully admitted, although there is no 
desire to emulate its methods. What must it not 
enjoy of reputation amidst a worshipful people 
to whom it is uniformly and overwhelmingly suc- 
cessful and who are not critical of its methods 
or its reports? 

Is a people so worshipful, and at the same time 
so sure of the divine potency of its leadership, 
going to revolt with no provocation? Not much. 



160 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

Is the dusky beneficiary going to throw over his 
old Mumbo Jumbo while the going is good and 
while the priest stands by to explain any ap- 
parent lapses, or even, by some wily hocus-pocus, 
to lend to real misfortune the appearance of 
divine beneficence? What is a little sutfering, 
with such prospects, such ends, and such a world- 
mission in plain view? The grumblers or critics 
are sacrilegious; they can be ignored or jailed. 
All great world-reforms deniund sacrifice and 
steadiness of faith. The devotion o-f the German 
people to an unworthy and a losing cause is truly 
pathetic, but there is no doubt about its unin- 
formed sincerity. This national devotion was 
grossly underestimated at first; there has been 
for us the same sort of disillusionment in this 
matter as there was concerning the essentially 
kindly and liumane character of the people. 
Some of us hoped for a protest of the ]K'ople 
against the atrocities of tlie army and navy, but 
there was, rather, a rejoicing among them and 
a pious satisfaction as of the saved viewing 
from the crystal battlements the lot of the 
damned. So that, although the reform of Ger- 
man ways must come from within, we have ceased 
to expect it so soon. As long as the present 
governmental system and methods are in opera- 



GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 161 

tion, it is hardly possible to get the plain facts 
known by Germans, let alone interpreted from 
an unbiased and non-fantastic point of view. 
The avenues, temporal and spiritual, for the 
transmission of other mores are closed. 

There is no present utility (though there may 
well be a prospective one) in telling a fanatical 
people that we are not fighting them, but their 
prepossession and religion. Fancy announcing 
to a Mohammedan that we are not contending 
against him, but against the Prophet and all his 
works. So long as the Germans fervently believe 
in their fetish, they will hug it to them the more 
closely, especially if it begins to whine or bluster 
about the impiety of those who would put 
asunder what " our good old God " had joined 
irrevocably together. There is not much use to 
rain down facts and tracts out of aircraft; 
they are " English lies.^' The case of the Ger- 
mans is a refractory one and will not yield to 
such milder means any more than it did, preced- 
ing war, to diplomatic representations and con- 
cessions. Then, they thought, the Day of vindi- 
cation was at hand; now tliat Day is here; and 
there is as yet no serious doubt tliat it will bring 
what was promised for it. How foolish to falter 
when success is right at hand I 



162 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

It is probable that the sufferings of some of 
Germany's vassals have not been sanctified unto 
them as part of a grandiose vindication of the 
fetish. M. Andre Cheradame ^ thinks that at 
least sections of the nations which Germany has 
" burglarized/' under the guise of alliance, are 
ripe for a change of heart, and argues for an at- 
tempt to enlighten them as to the issues at stake 
— at stake not only for the world, but for them- 
selves as well. He thinks that the projected 
Pan-Germany may thus explode from within. 
His ideas seem reasonable, for the insulating 
effect of the German obsession does not seem to 
have reached to the Czechs and other Slavic and 
otherwise alien races of the Dual Empire. Their 
severe sufferings and misgivings are not inter- 
pretable by the faith, as sacrifices to a cause, and 
propaganda might do much. It might, thinks 
this writer, pave the way for a decisive Gennan 
defeat. Therein lies its promise ; for there is no 
way out of this crucible of selection except 
through that eventuality. 

1 " How to Destroy Pan-Germany," in the Atlantic Monthly 
for December, 1917. 



XVI. THE ONE WAY TO UPSET THE 
FETISH 

The Germans will endure pain and sacrifice 
without losing their patience or docility, so long 
as they are not disillusioned. I have said that 
their godlet has made good — or that they are 
convinced that he has, which amounts to the same 
thing. But suppose he fails so egregiously that 
there is no concealment or interpretation of the 
fact possible, and no method adequate to dem- 
onstrate that he has, after all, won out, or will 
certainly do so. Suppose that strategic and vic- 
torious retreats bring the ark back into Germany 
itself. Suppose that the army is actually, and 
undeniably, and even admittedly defeated, and 
the government overthrown. Suppose the loot 
of Belgium and the other conquests has to be 
assembled and restored, and the wantonness of 
destruction jjaid for. And suppose, along with 
such happenings, the German people finally learn 
the unadorned truth : that England is not starved 
out, that American soldiers are really in Europe 
and are there for business, and so on — and 

163 



164 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

above all the truth as to how the world's opinion 
stands regarding them. Suppose that they 
learn that, instead of being admired, envied, and 
feared, they are the objects of contempt, loathing, 
and bitter resentment. 

Here would be wholesale disillusionment. 
And here would be, in addition to the former suf- 
ferings — then sanctilied and offered on the 
altar; now, in retrospect, bearing a different 
semblance — forebodings of another and more 
racking torture, that of liviii,^ by tolerance in a 
world empty of friends. Once it was England 
and America that were to write off all the con- 
queror's obligations; now it is the conquered who 
must pay their own, and indemnity besides. No 
people has ever viewed a more waste and dreary 
future than will the Germans on the morrow of 
defeat. On all sides people who have lost by 
their action property, comfort, peace of mind, 
their dearest ones — not to mention those who 
have been actually oppressed and enslaved and 
whose life-treasures have been preyed upon by the 
orgy of murderousness and lust. All about them 
peoples who make no account of their word of 
honor and who have come to regard " German " 
as synonymous with all that is dishonorable, 
treacherous, and ignoble. 



THE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 165 

Many people do not wish their children to 
study the German language, and there is already 
a movement on foot to exclude it from the public 
schools of this country. There is more than a 
suspicion that hospitality to the language, in the 
past, has been craftily abused, to sow discord 
within the nation; and that not alone through 
the German press, but also through the school- 
books, with their everlasting laudation of the 
German fetish. In fact, whether or not the char- 
acter of text-books in German has been deliber- 
ately manipulated — and it is not at all unbe- 
lievable, in the light of what we have come to 
know — the prevailing fetish-worship cannot 
but come out in such publications. It comes 
out, offensively enough, even when the authors 
are not Germans. To one who hates what Ger- 
many stands for, it is revolting to see the pic- 
tures and read the legends that are characteristic 
of German primers; for they reek of the unclean 
thing. This revulsion goes even farther. A 
man has admired and loved German literature of 
the earlier and cleaner period, and in particular, 
let us say, Goethe's master-work. He knows 
Goethe's attitude to be Prussian in no respect. 
He recalls that Goethe could not write war-songs, 
much less Hymns of Hate, because he could not 



166 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

hate his spiritual benefactors.^ And yet this 
man cannot now read Faust and the rest without 
offense. Schrecklich, let us say, occurs on this 
page, and what is the image it summons up? 
Here is a scene of peasant GemiltUchkcit, and 
one recalls whence he derived his original im- 
pression, now shattered. The lusts of Walpur- 
(jisnacht — have they not come to earth? The 
very words are offensive now — for how long, 
one cannot sa3\ May this soon pass I But were 
the poet's lines not prophetic? 

" Weh ! Weh ! 

Du hast sie zerstort, 

Die sehone "Welt, 

Mit miichtiger Faust; 

Sie stiirzt, sie zerfiillt! 

Wir tragen 

Die Triimmern ins Niehts liiniiber 

Und klagen 

Ueber die verlorne Sehone." 
1 Eckermann, Gesprdche mit Goethe, entry for March 14, 
1830. Relative to Prussianism: in a conversation with Ecker- 
mann, in March, 1828, Goethe deplores the repression of the 
(ierman youth, contrasting the system that makes thorn " pre- 
maturely tame " with the English " Gliick der persiinlichen 
Freiheit." The conversation is too long to be reproduced here, 
l>ut I cannot refrain from giving one extract. 

" Es darf kein Bube mit der Peitsche knallen, oder singen, 
oder rufen, sogleich ist die Polizei da, es ihm zu verbieten. 
Es geht bei uns alles dahin, die Hebe Jugend friihzeitig zahm 
zu machen und alle Xatur, alle Ori^inalitiit und alio Wildheit 
auszutreiben, sodass am Ende niehts iibrigbleibt ala der 
Philister." 



THE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 167 

Even in trade there will be an attitude differ- 
ent from the generous one encountered by Ger- 
mans while yet they were profiting so success- 
fully in the peaceful competition, enjoying the 
reality of the " free seas " for which they have 
lately clamored, and the host of other advan- 
tages accorded by an enlightened world to a re- 
spected and efficient competitor. Now it is seen 
that Germany is not, in any sense of the term, a 
" good sport,'' and still less a good loser ; for, 
while succeeding notably, she was willing to 
break the rules of the game and make a gross 
assault upon any and all competitors that were 
succeeding in any degree. It is the old and obso- 
lete ideal of world-monopoly that has animated 
her. But now some of Germany's enemies have 
learned, under necessity, to supply for them- 
selves demands that only Germany could form- 
erly meet ; they do not need Germany any more. 
Among other disservices that she has wrought 
to the world, Germany has staged a demonstra- 
tion of the necessity of national economic self- 
suflQciency, and so has contributed to put off the 
day when artificial barriers to freedom of trade 
will be a thing of the past. This is a part of the 
damage done to civilization which is not often 
mentioned, but it is a very real one. Some of 



168 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

her fellow-nations will not need Germany, I have 
said; and there will be others which will shun 
her, because they have learned to suspect and 
dislike her. Who wants to do business with 
even a reformed pirate? 

It is said that Germany must be powerless or 
free — meaning, as we take it here, free, first of 
all, of her obsession. It is the contention here 
that if she is rendered powerless by being con- 
quered, she will become free; but that she has 
little or no chance of becoming free until she is 
decisively defeated. The obsession with the 
fetish acts as a sort of shell or insulation for the 
mores, rendering them inaccessible to outside 
influences and thus impairing their power of 
adaptation to conditions wliich are not sensed. 
The mores are thus not sensitive to environment ; 
they are stunted in the matter of variation, and 
the wholesome action of selection is impaired. 
The first need, for better adjustnu^nt, is to strip 
off the insulation, thus invading the isolation ; 
and to open before the mores a real, in place of an 
imaginary or constructed environment. This 
can be done only by tlie defeat of the supposedly 
invincible armies and the demonstration that 
militarism is not the master-key to national and 
international destiny. It is when Mumbo Jumbo 



THE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 169 

fails to make good that they take him out and 
beat him, or even pitch him into the river. A 
peace without victory could be too variously and 
ingeniously interpreted by interested parties; it 
would mean the persistence of the obsession and, 
of a consequence, further manifestations of un- 
civilized conduct in international affairs. It 
would mean at least uneasiness in the world for 
decades to come. 

There are those who cry out against such a 
conclusion, asserting that force never settles any- 
thing; that war is uniformly bad and has never 
brought about good results. People who really 
believe this are as impervious to reason and fact 
as the Germans themselves; only a demonstra- 
tion in which they personally figure can en- 
lighten them. But there are others who thought- 
lessly repeat such foolish assertions; and per- 
haps they are worth spending words upon. Such 
assertions represent sentimentality, not sense. 
War is like all the rest of human things : not all 
good, nor yet all bad, but mixed. It has done 
much in the past that nothing else could have 
accomplished ; it is now performing before us a 
selection not otherwise to be hoped for. I do 
not care to argue an obvious case, and shall leave 
the generalities about the good and evil of war 



170 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

with these remarks and the implications of my 
general argument. But as to force never ac- 
complishing anything, that too is the nonsense 
of a fanatical utterance. Force has underlain 
all of the institutions upon which civilization 
has most prided itself: the family, law, govern- 
ment, rights, morals, and religion. How was 
the decision won over piracy, or slavery, or any 
other outworn practice that by its persistence 
constituted a menace to civilization? By argu- 
ing and passing a resolution? By tearful ex- 
postulation, or even by prayer? How did we get 
our national independence and start the infection 
of modem democracy? By moral suasion? It 
takes a conflict to secure selection and the sur- 
vival of the fit, I repeat, in the societal range as 
in the organic ; and the more vital the issue, the 
surer it is that that conflict will come down to 
the ultimate form of physical violence. If one 
wants to maintain that an issue must be settled 
by ax)peal to reason, then the answer is that both 
parties must see reason. There is no argument 
in the presence of homicidal mania except that 
of force and the strait-jacket. It is a pity 
that this is so, but it is no less so because it is a 
pity. So is it a pity that a baby, leaning too 
far out of a window, will fall to its death; but 



THE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 171 

shall we pass a resolution against gravitation? 
It is a pity, but yet it is a fact, that some people, 
especially if obsessed, will not see reason any 
more than an excited and overwrought child will, 
until the exuberance of their unreason is re- 
duced by punishment. The tense nerves are dis- 
charged. Then they are fit to be reasoned with, 
and not before. It is then that they become cap- 
able of seeing the light. 

England saw the light, not from Burke's ex- 
postulations but after her war with us, and has 
developed an astonishing capacity, out of the 
maladroitness of the " colonial system," for rul- 
ing peoples. The South saw the light, after the 
Civil War, and would no more go back to slavery 
now than would the North. The Boers have seen 
the light. The days of the Oom Pauls are over. 
No grander conception of the mission and destiny 
of the British Empire as an enlightened peace- 
group was ever expressed than that of a former 
Boer commander and man of vision,^ now one of 
the bulwarks of that Empire's Council. 

And here before us is an issue, which, as I 
have remarked, dwarfs into insignificance any 
other that the race has met. There has been no 
lack of attempts to settle it by way of peaceful 

1 Gen. J. C. Smuts, " The British Commonwealth of Nations." 



172 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

means, and they have one and all failed. It has 
come down to a matter of force, of killing, and of 
misery-making, and it must issue in decisive mili- 
tary defeat for the Germans if there is to be 
peace in the world and an extension of interna- 
tional relations of amitj^ All those who hate 
force and war can help to eliminate them, and 
also to shorten present suffering, by putting all 
their powers into the effort to reach the decision 
at the earliest possible moment. 

It is not a question of annihilating or enslav- 
ing Germany, as she would like to do to the rest 
of us. She expects that, doubtless, judging us 
by herself. It is a question of eradicating her 
fetish-worship by demonstrating that her idols 
have feet of clay. Nothing but defeat of the in- 
vincible army and government, and the conse- 
quent letting-in of light as to the world's opinion 
of her course can do that. If this is accomplished, 
she can make her own selection, by revolution or 
otherwise. This is a tremendous task, but there 
is no other way of getting the results. The Ger- 
man government has been prodigal of promises, 
concealments, and lies to cover partial failures. 
The people have trusted it implicitly. After de- 
feat there will be no more opportunity to conceal 
or deceive, and the past, present, and prospective 



THE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 173 

suffering of the people will cause them to ask : 
Who got us into this, and why? If the revulsion 
is sharp enough, the fact of maladjustment to 
the conditions of life in the world will be sufB- 
ciently evident in the national loss and pain. In 
such case there will be no desire to return to 
the gods that have led into nothing but desperate 
calamity. The first accounting in such a case is 
not with the mores, but with the false leaders; 
and with the autocracy and militarism will go, 
unless the Germans are malevolent by nature, in 
the very germ-plasm, that obsession and insula- 
tion which have drugged sensitiveness to environ- 
ment and thus prevented adjustment along mod- 
era lines. 

The process of selection, to be effective, is 
bound to be painful. It is an operation where, 
if there is faltering at the end, there might as 
well have been no cutting at all. To this point 
I shall return. But it is to be recalled that Ger- 
many is in the position, among nations, of a 
criminal outlaw among his fellow-men. It helps 
the wrong-doer to get on the right track if he is 
obliged to repair the damage he has done. The 
thief cannot be allowed, even in his own interest, 
to keep his plunder subsequent to his conversion. 
When the Allied spokesman demanded repara- 



174 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

tion, restitution, and guarantees, he was calling 
for precisely those things which are best for Ger- 
many, as well as due her victims. Insistence 
upon these demands is indispensable. Much 
there is that Germany must pay for, in 3'ears to 
come — through the contempt and dislike of the 
world — for it cannot be atoned for in terms 
of material things, and no one who is civilized 
wants to see retaliation in kind. But what she 
can repair and restore she sliould be held to 
repair and restore to the last item. 

I have said that nothing but a military victory 
will do. That is because I can see no other way 
to upset the fetish, strip off the insulation, and 
thus expose the Crerman mores to the necessity 
of adjustment. The condition of conditions is 
the fall of the fetish. If that can be accom- 
plished in some other way that shall be decisive 
and definitive, well and good. Nevertheless 
whatever the nature of the last push that dis- 
places the tottering structure, military force will 
have been an indispensable factor; and any al- 
ternative way can scarcely be less terrible. 



XVII. ON FALTERING AT THE 
FINISH 

When the war began there was not a few of us 
who saw the issue as a local thing. Desperate 
efforts were being made to localize it. Only 
later did it appear that the very essence of civili- 
zation was challenged, and that the warnings of 
Washington about European entanglements were 
irrelevant to an issue that transcended any conti- 
nent or hemisphere. Some saw this after the 
rush through Belgium, others after the Lusitania 
episode; but it was over two years before public 
opinion, in this relatively remote land, had 
sensed the danger sufficiently to support armed 
intervention. 

Similarly slow has been the comprehension of 
the strength and system of preparedness of the 
enemy. It was incredible that he would do what 
he did in the line of atrocities; and it was also 
incredible that he had been working out his code 
and preparing so long and so successfully. Even 
now, with not a little bitter experience behind 
us, we are from day to day amazed and shocked 

175 



176 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

at the exhibitions of unscrupulous efficiency that 
are being revealed to us. It is easy enough to 
blame some one else, especially some one in 
power whom we do not like, for not appreciating 
the whole situation beforehand; but it is grace- 
less to charge any ruler of a civilized nation with 
sloth or cowardice because his mind was not at- 
tuned to take in the bearings of what he had to 
be brought by hard exi)erience to believe at all. 
If there had been another Kaiser at Washington, 
very likely he would have had a mind attuned to 
the situation as an American's was not. There is 
real ground for self-respect in the fact that we 
were not able readily to conceive of the incon- 
ceivably base. No one but the bitter partisan 
can jibe at the remark attributed to the Secretary 
of War: "I delight in the fact that when we 
entered this war we were not, like our adversary, 
ready for it, anxious for it, prepared for it, and 
inviting it. Accustomed to peace, we were not 
ready." " The overwhelming majority of Ameri- 
can people," comments Professor Sherman,^ 
"will perfectly understand that utterance and 
sympathize with it. In exactly the same sense 
the English people, in the midst of a tremendous 

1 " Why Mr. Roosevelt and the Rest of Us Are at War," in 
the New York Nation for November 15, 1917. 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 177 

emergency, have very generally pointed, with a 
kind of tragic pride and joy, to the fact that they 
were not prepared^ as the irrefutable evidence of 
their pacific intentions and as the substantial 
vindication of their honor in the community of 
nations.'' 

This military unpreparedness, however, though 
we may rightly be proud of it and of the spirit 
behind it, has represented for us the same sort 
of handicap that an unarmed and peaceful citi- 
zen labors under when he is suddenly obliged to 
encounter a desperado witli a blackjack. We 
are finding that out. German efficiency has 
never been as great or as thorough as in the 
present struggle; that is no wonder, for it has put 
its best for decades into preparation against 
"The Day." At first it looked like an unequal 
contest, with such a preponderance of nations 
and numbers on the Allied side; but that the 
inequality lay in the other direction speedily 
became apparent. It will never cease to amaze 
most of us that the Germans did not at once take 
Paris; we were so frightened at that time that 
subsequent shocks have lost their power to ter- 
rify; we are almost ready to credit the tale 
that it was his gluttony and thirst for French 
champagne that defeated the invader. And 



178 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

much of the initial advantage still remains — 
above all the centralization of control. The 
Allies have admittedly made error after error, 
where the enemy has made but few. This is 
natural enough, for, as we now know, the Allies 
were to the Germans as a novice in an odious 
trade to an enthusiastic devotee of the same. 

Except for the British navy. For the German 
naval programs and performances had been ob- 
served by the Admiralty, viewed with concern, 
protested against, and at length met with coun- 
ter-preparation. Here the German menace had 
been taken seriously and the defenses strength- 
ened. But it was defense only that was contem- 
plated ; as a matter of fact, the British navy has 
come to be one of the most powerful factors mak- 
ing for peace and freedom that the world has 
known, and it has been, in this war, the very 
bulwark of civilization. Germany points at 
British navalism as identical w'ith the militarism 
charged to her; but the character of the one dif- 
fers from that of the other by reason of the spirit 
in which the arm of power is used or designed to 
be used. There is no fetish about British " na- 
valism,'- if it is pleasing to call it that. There is 
really no -ism or doctrine. The doctrine behind 
German militarism is now clearly enough re- 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 179 

vealed ; but there is as little of that sort of dogma 
in British navalism as behind our new American 
militancy. Either may lead to an -ism if the 
nation in question becomes sufficiently obsessed 
and retrogressive; but there is as yet no British 
or American tendency toward beating with the 
heated and unbalanced head in the dust before 
the fetish -stool. 

The initial lack of preparedness is being rap- 
idly overcome. Says one of the Cabinet officers : 
" A democracy making war is never an agreeable 
sight, for it is not in its normal line of life. And 
those who sneer or jeer because it does not play 
the game as well as might be, pay an uncon- 
scious compliment to the merits of free institu- 
tions. It takes time to accustom men to the 
short, hard words of command, and to the sur- 
render of personal judgment. It is not easy, 
either, for a nation to turn its back upon the con- 
ception of a world where justice works out its 
ends by quiet processes, and in its stead come to 
the stern belief that the ultimate court is a battle- 
field. So, if there is wrenching and side-slip- 
ping and confusion, there should be no surprise. 
The surprise to me has been with what compara- 
tive ease the transition has been made, and how 
much unconscious preparation for the new work 



180 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

had been already made." It is remarkable that 
democracies where freedom of opinion makes for 
diffusion, have adjusted themselves so rapidly 
and effectively to unexpected and poorly under- 
stood conditions. It simply goes to show the 
adaptability of a public oi)inion unused to direc- 
tion and repression. A nation which has faced 
for generations toward production and peace 
must now aim at destruction and war. It is no 
slight task to swing the massive engine about. 
It takes time to beat the plow-share into a sword 
and to make of a professional producer an expert 
destroyer. But there is another thing that is 
still liarder to do^ and that is to steel the hearts 
of humane men of peace against premature pity 
and softening; to have them hold relentlessly to 
the noisome task until it is done for good and 
all ; to have no faltering before or at the finish. 

Our adversaries have no such prospect to cause 
them concern; no hearts need to be steeled 
against human pity. We are, again, plainly at a 
material disadvantage. It is we, not the adver- 
sary, who have lost precious lives by humanity 
and chivalry. Our foes do not mind crying 
" Kamerad I " and then opening ranks for the 
hidden machine-guns to play upon the unsuspect- 
ing. It is they who will try, in straits, to net us 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 181 

by plausible duplicity, to our destruction. We 
do not want to practice any of these things ; we 
are too proud to fight in that way ; but we must 
not be taken in any more by reason of our 
humane impulses. 

Particularly do we Americans run the risk of 
insisting foolishly and ignorantly upon stopping 
the conflict before selection is accomplished. 
Not a few of us seem to be impressed by the Rus- 
sian formula of " No annexations and no indem- 
nities." It is a fair guess that that formula 
originated in a German head. What is happen- 
ing in Russia as the result of fantastic and Utop- 
ian procedures ought to give even a sentimental- 
ist pause. The trouble, as I have said, is the in- 
capacity of many people for \dsualization of 
actualities not right at hand. Such persons are 
bleared as to the mind's eye. All right-minded 
men want the war to stoj); but they want it to 
stay stopped. The only important question is as 
to how soon it can stop, on condition that it shall 
satisfy justice, perform its selection, and so stop 
for good. How soon can " Never Again I " in 
the matter of this great issue, be transformed 
from a fervent purpose into an assured reality? 

Now what some of us fear, in connection with 
this " no-indemnities " suggestion, is that certain 



182 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

sentimentalists, by raising a rhythmic clamor 
that shall beat intolerably upon the ears of a 
tired world, will succeed in staying the hand of 
justice in the matter of restitution, reparation, 
and guarantees ; and thus operate to prevent the 
cleaning-up of this whole job in workmanlike 
style. ^ Presumably such a movement will not 
originate in Belgium, or France, or, indeed, 
among any other of the victims of Germany's bar- 
barities; nor yet among those who have been 
near enough to see and know, and to experience 
righteous indignation. It will be among the 
ethical theorists whose phantasms have not been 
tested by reference to fact, and who can voice a 
lofty magnanimity from a protected station. 

Of all the Allies, we Americans are farthest 
removed from a realization of what the Germans 
have planned and done. Even the French have 
felt that they must keep an account of the details 
of German ferocity agaiust the day of settlement. 
Over here we do not know even by hearsay — 
least of all have we yet experienced — the bar- 
barities which the French are afraid they may 
forget, as the weariness grows more mortal and 

1 The rest of this chapter is derived, with insignificant altera- 
tion, from a letter of the author, entitled " On Faltering at 
the Finish," in the New York Nation for June 7, 1917. 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 183 

the sensibilities are dulled through the long 
months of trials and efforts. But now we shall 
have a weighty voice in the settlement of things. 
And if the end should come before we experience 
the losses and the heart-ache, we shall be too 
likely to minimize the wantonness committed 
against others, and shall perhaps wish to con- 
clude the task without bringing it to a finish. 
Some of us will harp on the familiar sentiment 
that the criminal is not responsible, that punish- 
ment should not be vindictive, that severity never 
acts as a deterrent; others will appeal to the 
chivalry that will not strike the opponent when 
he is down. A number of people will want to be 
content with the treatment of symptoms, and to 
neglect the extirpation of the lurking disease. 
Other scruples will appear which do more credit 
to the heart than to the head. And then, if the 
evil is not resolutely cut out, it will resume its 
growth and the suffering and loss will have to be 
incurred again, in more disastrous form, later on. 
The distinction between hostility to the Ger- 
man government and that toward the German 
people will again be drawn. It is risky to make 
a distinction of this kind. The issue is not, at 
bottom, hostility to any persons; it is reproba- 
tion of what the persons stand for. But there 



184 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

is no doubt, as we have said, that the German 
people, Socialists and all, have stood for what 
the German government and armies have done. 
They have been deceived, no doubt; but the re- 
sponsibility for that cannot rest elsewhere than 
on themselves. They have been dominated by a 
fetish; but they bent gladly in tlieir adulation. 
If they were merely in error, yet it is the way of 
the world that people must sulYer for their own 
errors. It is thus that they learn to correct 
themselves — not by being instructed and ex- 
cused, over and over, but by bitter experience. 
It is not just that those who were not dominated 
by illusion, or had worked themselves out of it, 
should i)ay for the damage resulting from the 
ecstasy and intoxication of the obsessed. The 
German i)eople have stood for the destruction 
and rape that have been perpetrated upon other 
people's homes and women ; it is right that they 
should expiate all this in the small and insuffi- 
cient degree possible. Much is irreparable; re- 
paration for the reparable should be sternly ex- 
acted. Only thus can the illusion and obsession 
be dispelled. The way to see one's actions as 
they are is to be held accountable for their re- 
sults; and many a man changes his ways when 
he is once forced to visualize tJiem as others see 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 185 

them. There are no fruits more meet for re- 
pentance than those tendered, voluntarily or not, 
in restitution and reparation. 

There has got to be a real right-about here. 
Life would not be livable for most of humanity if 
the German ideas and power should prevail. 
The fact that most of humanity now sees the 
peril and is in arms against the dominance of 
that for which Germany stands is eloquent wit- 
ness to this contention. Here is the revelation 
of a startling danger to the world. It is like the 
discovery of an unsuspected malignant tumor in 
the body. Now that we have had to go in with 
the knife and have uncovered an insidiousness of 
menace that is simply incredible, the operation 
should not be stayed by false humanitarianism 
until the roots of the disorder are removed. 
This is not vindictiveness or inhumanity; it is, 
on the contrary, common sense and an exhibition 
of the highest humanity. The wholesome devel- 
opment of human society is unthinkable with this 
menace always in its vitals. And as for hitting 
an enemy when down, who would apply that rule 
of chivalry to a serpent? It is not the men that 
are the target for the blows, I repeat — it is the 
thing the men stand for; only, as long as they 
stand for the venomous and detestable thing and 



186 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

hug it to them, they should expect to stop the 
blows that are levelled at it. 

The victory is uot here, but it is only delayed. 
However long the delay, it is not too early to con- 
sider the terms of settlement. Whatever these 
are to be, this country has no business to intro- 
duce palliation for the culprit where it has not 
done the suffering. If an3' of the belligerents 
who has borne the burden and pain of oppression 
and humiliation wants to ease up on the de- 
feated aggressor — if Belgium or France, for ex- 
ample, wishes so to do — that is in order. But 
for us, who for mauy months liave i'e})osed in a 
safety bought by others' sacritices, to introduce 
any element of condonement is worse than im- 
pertinent. Our attitude should be an humble 
one until we have suffered something of what the 
rest have suffered and attained something of the 
dignity that goes with it. The Allies are not 
revengeful barbarians; they will be magnanimous 
enough without us to teach them. They have 
met the peril face to face, and they agree that 
they want restitution, reparation, and guaran- 
tees. Entering fresh, as we do, later in the 
struggle, we might easily, when it comes to a 
settlement, introduce an element of easygoing 
and careless generosity which would amount to 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 187 

faltering at the finish. Our part is to realize the 
seriousness of this situation, drop all dallying 
with preconceptions and soft imaginings, and see 
it through to a genuine end. 



XVIII. ON INTELLIGENT ADJUST- 
MENT TO THE INEVITABLE 

This gigantic world-convulsion is not the end 
of all things. It may seem so to the simple- 
minded individual whose horizon is bounded by 
his suffering. Similar periods in the world's 
history have led to despairing prophecies of the 
world's end or of the advent of some super- 
natural iiower, as alone competent to bring order 
out of bewilderment and confusion. This is only 
the end of some things and the beginning of 
others. If the great issue is decided now, we 
shall eventually enter, not upon a new and 
strange societal order, but upon one which has 
shaken off enormous impediments and may now 
attain, unhampered, to closer adjustment to life- 
conditions along the lines of its vindicated code. 
If, on the contrary, the decision is lost by us, or 
drawn, or not carried to its linish, we shall go on 
to the next stage of a protracted period of con- 
flict and selection, with all its attendant misery. 
If the civilized world cannot now rise in its 

188 



INTELLIGENT ADJUSTMENT 189 

might, it will have to do so, later on, amidst 
throes of human pain to which the present ones 
are as preliminary twinges. But the selection 
will take place — then, if not now. 

This war is not an unique affair, except in the 
matter of scale. It is discharging war's normal 
function, just as it did when Roman fought Car- 
thaginian or when Napoleon's armies swept over 
Europe. Evei^ such war uprooted some codes 
and societal structures and made room for the 
persistence and growth of others. Now, in the 
perspective of history, reason generally applauds 
the results. In any case they are what has 
enabled the modern world to become what it is. 
These results are also in sequence, exhibiting a 
trend from a code we call savage, through the 
barbaric, to the civilized. Occasional retrograde 
movements are to be found, but they are pres- 
ently made up for. Judging by the past, it is 
unbelievable that civilization can go back on its 
course and stay there. This is the broad reason 
for inferring that the cause of the Allies, backed 
by the approval of most of what used to be reck- 
oned as the civilized world, cannot permanently 
fail. It cannot, because the code it defends is 
one long ago proved to be a better adaptation to 
the life-conditions of societies than a code includ- 



190 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

in«r the elements which characterize the present 
challenging code. 

The extension of the peace-group is a scarcely 
interrupted evolutionary process, and there is no 
discoverable reason why it should not be further 
extended, this present vicious challenge once re- 
pelled. The code of this peace-group, in so far 
as the latter had taken form previous to the chal- 
lenge, has shown no change in its essentials as it 
has expanded over a wider and wider clientage. 
Its democracy is in the air and has been auto- 
matically enlarging its sphere of influence, dec- 
ade by decade, until the challenge came. War, 
on the contrary, with militarism and autocracy, 
has been on the steady decline for a long time, 
and even the warlike, militaristic, and autocratic 
peoples have nominally repudiated it. This pres- 
ent war is really between peoples who say they 
are peace-loving, industrial, and democratic, and 
are, and peoples who say they are all these things, 
and are not. Both sides lay claim to the more 
expedient code of peace, and thereby vindicate its 
prospects of extension ; both sides claim to abhor 
the code of violence and thereby point to its 
eventual decline, if not elimination. In view of 
such considerations, I cannot see a lasting vie- 



INTELLIGENT ADJUSTMENT 191 

tory for any other code of international conduct 
than the one now challenged. With such con- 
victions, it is impossible to be permanently de- 
pressed over the incidents of the selective process. 

It matters, of course, that the Bolsheviki are 
writing themselves down in the Shakespearean 
fashion ; but it does not matter vitally. It mat- 
ters when you are among the trees but not when 
you view the woods. This whole situation is 
quite out of the hands of individuals like Lenin, 
or Hindenburg, or the Kaiser. Individuals mat- 
ter some, but not much, or vitally, or in the long 
run. We see the chijis, but it is the tide that 
counts. This human fragment is borne promi- 
nently upon a tide of rebellion; the tide rushes 
on to dominance and he is the founder of a new 
nation or dispensation ; the tide is checked and 
turned back, and he is a traitor of inglorious 
memory; the tide sweeps forward again, with 
renewed power, and he is a martyr, born before 
his time. 

Societal evolution is a vast process, where the 
forces are massive and act with unhurried delib- 
eration, endlessly interlocking, within a spacious 
field. " Ein wechselnd Weben, Ein gluhend 
Leben." There are dim ages of the process be- 



192 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

hind us, and ages untold yet to come. Selection 
occurs at every stage, and is but an episode along 
the course. 

How then can men do anything, if all is deter- 
mined by such cosmic power? Why struggle? 
Well, man can do something with gravitation, 
with the expansive power of steam, with the 
germ-plasm stream, although he can control the 
processes themselves in no degree. He can move 
things about, into the path or out of the path of 
natural forces. He can fix the mill-wheel be- 
neath the falling water. He can place the cylin- 
der in the way of the steam. He can isolate or 
bring together the sexes of animals. This has 
been done so successfully for man's interests and 
welfare that man has conceived tlie idea tliat he 
is master of nature. But wliat he has done is 
to learn nature's ways and adapt his action to 
them. At a pinch he is nature's play tiling and 
victim : the earth shakes a little, and his great 
works collapse; the volcano spills a little gas 
over its crater-rim upon a town, and the lords 
of nature lay them down and are still. 

It is not otherwise with the elemental forces of 
the societal realm. They cannot be mastered; 
they must be studied and known and adjusted 
to, as a condition of societal well-being. The 



INTELLIGENT ADJUSTMENT 193 

efforts of many a would-be benefactor and up- 
lifter of the race are sterile or even harmful be- 
cause he is trying to do what he would realize, if 
he knew what a society is, and what can and can- 
not be done with it, to be out of the question. 
Every one knows that water will not run uphill ; 
yet in the societal realm there have been plenty 
of well-meaning people, through the ages, who 
have worn out and wasted their lives in unhappi- 
ness, trying ineffectually to overcome a societal 
tendency and law which are equally inevitable. 
If an ignoramus plays about in a chemical labo- 
ratory, we keep our distance, for we expect trou- 
ble as a result of ignorance of chemical sub- 
stances and laws. Knowledge of the experi- 
menter's good intentions does not reassure us at 
all. But we easily permit the uninformed med- 
dler to prowl about the structure of society, pok- 
ing and tinkering, apparently in the belief that, 
provided his intentions are good, nothing but 
human weal can result. We are bound to learn, 
sometime, that powerful forces are at work with- 
in the societal range, and that ignorant tamper- 
ing is even more dangerous here than elsewhere 
because so many more people have to endure the 
consequences. Then we shall want more knowl- 
edge of these forces, that we may adjust to them. 



194 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

The present is a sort of orgy of dislocation and 
of alteration in the conditions of society's life. 
In the early pages of this little book I have cited 
a selection of unplanned and unforeseen adjust- 
ments that are already in the process of painful 
birth. And I have gone on to show some of the 
exhibitions of the societal forces, in this their 
period and phase of inexorable stress and strain. 
Many of the barriers which we have raised be- 
tween ourselves and the raw and remorseless vio- 
lence of primordial power have now broken down 
and must be painfully built up again. It is a 
time for knowledge and for the broadest outlook. 
It is a time for perspective of the past, that we 
may not become involved in vain hopes or un- 
called-for despairs. It is a time when we must 
understand the forces determining the evolution 
and life of human society as well as possible, 
that we may move things into and out of their 
path with the idea of utilizing their power in the 
interest of human well-being. 

Intelligent adjustment to the known inevitable 
is as rare on earth as automatic adjustment to 
the unknown inevitable is common. But the 
former is an abridged and less painful process. 
Adaptation is sure, because it is the condition of 
comfort and of life itself. Adaptability is that 



INTELLIGENT ADJUSTMENT 195 

which hurries and eases the process. Of all 
earthly things that which possesses the supreme 
capacity for swift adaptation is the human mind. 
But that capacity is undeveloped, fettered in its 
action by pseudo-knowledge, bias, caprice, and 
sentimentality — except where tests and verifica- 
tion are immediate and conclusive, and where, 
therefore, knowledge is almost automatically ac- 
quired. Nowhere is real knowledge and science 
so little in intelligent demand as in the societal 
realm, for the latter is self-sown to whims and 
dreams of all varieties. It is thought that man 
can here have his own will ; here, at last and at 
least, he is lord. He senses no elemental powers 
in the field. Here, of all places, he needs but to 
plan and " create " ; pass resolutions and regula- 
tions ; think out Utopias in bed and then rise and 
gird himself to their realization; abolish prop- 
erty or the family, or government, or religion. 
Naturally he is taken by the theory that societal 
evolution is by individual purposeful action. 
Naturally he regards insistence upon the control 
exerted by spontaneous, automatic, and imper- 
sonal forces as an assault upon his " free will." 
Sometimes, in a crisis, the verities stand forth 
and enforce to themselves an attention which 
they do not get in ordinary times. Many people 



196 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

are now perplexed and in weak despair because 
their comfortable little formulas crack and break 
under the weight of explanation laid upon them. 
Perhaps it is a favorable occasion to offer the 
contention that " social theory '' is not wholly 
academic after all. 

But the thesis of this little book is not thus 
general. I have aimed at an entirely practical 
application of evolutionary theory to a particu- 
lar episode in the evolution of human society. 
For those whose convictions run with mine, a 
quite definite line of action is indicated. It is 
possible enough to arrive at the same convictions 
without going through a course of reasoning in 
self-justification; but, as I said at the outset, no 
faith was ever weakened by the support of reason. 



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